Skittle Me This and Skittle Me That

Who doesn't love skittles? Seriously...

Not only do they tast great, provide a needed sugar rush and represent every colour of the rainbow, but now they have another, equally awesome function:  patterning.  Thanks to Kevin, who used skittles to help us understand patterning this week. Those were the most tasty manipulatives I've ever used.  Actually, it's a tie between those skittles and the Hershey's chocolate bar from the fractions lesson, but you get my point.  If you want to increase student engagement, consider using food.

Coloured Blocks

And now down to business.  Kevin's use of skittles was a great way to clearly represent patterning and set the stage for lessons on algebra.  After all, patterning is essential to algebra since part of algebra is recognizing patterns in numbers.  Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of the patterns we created using Kevin's skittles (because I ate them) but that's okay because we also used coloured blocks as manipulatives for representing algebraic patterns. 

The coloured blocks were a great way to represent the constant and the variables of a numerical algebraic expression in visual terms that made the pattern easier to recognize for us visual learners.

Another set up that can be used to try and recognize a pattern is the table of values. Among the different types of patterns are repeating patterns, shrinking patterns and increasing patterns. 


Can you guess the pattern in this table of values?

Henna used a highly relevant halloween themed activity for algebra which required us to solve algebraic equations in order to crack a code pertaining to Frankenstein's candy. This would be a solid junior/intermediate math activity. 

The main thing to keep in mind when dealing with patterns is to search for relationships.  Relationships, relationships, relationships.