You know how sometimes I tell you two seemingly unrelated things and then, after a little while, they both tie together so nicely and the activity makes perfect sense?  Well, I’m about to do that again with this post on pattern activities for kindergarten, so please bare with me.  Or skip ahead if this is a last minute rest time idea — I know how important rest time is. SO important in fact, that I wrote an ENTIRE book on Quiet Bins for a Year of rest times!

We have been working on some pattern activities for Sam, my kindergartener.  We have been running the gamete of threading beads onto pipe cleaners, making patterns with cut up paper, and using our bodies to jump, hop, and skip them.  Running the gamete; I mean it quite literally.  We decided to do some painting, and I was encouraging Sam to paint some patterns – he was doing quite well.

He wanted to continue painting patterns during his rest time (which is the time he plays independently while I do some work).  But I am no rookie, my 4 year old, unsupervised, with paint is not going to end well.  Instead, I suggested he use the clothespin and popsicle stick reading activity we created earlier this week, as Sam is slowly learning to read.

Sam really wanted to continue patterning (and I really wanted rest time to begin).  The clothespins make such a nice rest time activity …. (and finally ….)

Our Clothespin Pattern Activities for Kindergarten!

I decided to combine our clothespin activity with our painting patterns activity.

I painted a few popsicle sticks with patterns.  Purple, Blue, Purple, Blue …. and Orange, Orange, Red …. and so on.  I left room at the end of each popsicle stick for Sam to continue the pattern independently.

I then painted the tips of a bunch of clothespins the various colours.  A tip to make this quicker {should you also be waiting for rest time to begin} is to clip them all to a piece of cardboard, paint them all the various colours, and pop a hair dryer over top for a few minutes.

They dried very quickly and Sam was able to play with some lovely, bright, and colourful pattern activities for Kindergarten.

Since we had been working on patterns for sometime, and Sam was really get the hang of them, I decided this activity might be a good opportunity to introduce ABC patterns.

I wrote some alphabet letters on clothespins (A, B, and C).  Then I modeled for Sam how this type of pattern works.

If we had a popsicle stick with the colours red, blue, red, blue, we would clip the letters A, B, A, B.  If we had the colors orange, orange, red, blue, orange, orange, red, blue, we would clip the letters A, A, B, C, A, A, B, C.  After I modeled a few he was eager to give it a try.  This can be a tricky concept, but Sam caught on right away (love when that happens!).

Soon I will have Sam try these ABC patterns and have him extend them on his own.  But like all things we do, we will do it slowly, introducing ideas and concepts slowly, with lots of time to play with these new ideas before building on them.  Definitely how my little ones learn best.

These clothespin pattern activities will get added to our quiet time activities for Sam to play with and practice whenever he likes.  Or whenever Mama needs a few minutes of quiet.

Quiet Bins to the rescue! Be sure to check out my eBook and Book, A Year of Educational Quiet Bins, you will be so glad you did.