Keep the pattern going

💡 How it plays and why it helps

A child threading beads who stops halfway has to know which color comes next. Keep the pattern going asks the same thing with shapes. A row such as triangle, star, triangle, star, triangle ends in two empty boxes, and your Pre-K child taps the two-piece block that fills them, chosen from four. The instruction is read aloud. A round has five rows, and every answer is checked and explained: the pattern is a triangle, a star, so it goes on with a star, a triangle.

Extending a pattern means looking at where it stopped, not where it began. That is a first taste of predicting what comes next from a rule. The hint is to say the shapes out loud and keep going into the empty boxes.

One wrong block starts the pattern over: triangle, star, when the row just ended on a triangle. It looks right because it is the pattern. Point to the last shape and ask, "What comes after this one?" Praise the looking: "You checked where the row stopped."