Starting A Unit - What Do They Know: Part One

In Brian's Grade 6 class this week he began to pre-assess his students' knowledge around patterning.  The first strand he is doing is Patterning and Algebra and the expectation he is reporting on this term is Overall #1:  Describe and represent relationships in growing and shrinking patterns (where the terms are whole numbers), and investigate repeating patterns involving rotations.

He began the lesson by having the students brainstorm all that they knew about patterns.  At first they did some thinking on their own and then moved into "think-pair-share" with a partner and then their table groups. 

Once they could not think of anything else, he then had them sort their words into three categories:  Attributes, Strategies/Tools, and Vocabulary.  This is now an anchor chart that they have up in the room for the students to not only refer to, but also to add onto it as new ideas and understandings come up.

Now that their schema had been activated, the students then got a chance to look at a pattern and then figure out what the pattern rule was, and also make predictions as to what the next term number would be if the pattern continued.  Here is the pattern they were given:  (my apologies as it should show as being a horizontal pattern and not a vertical pattern).

Many of them quickly picked up on that the pattern rule was "Start at 2 and increase by 2 each time."  As well, they had a discussion as to if it mattered that the colour chips were turned over or not, and if in addition to the pattern rule, if the model of the pattern was something to consider as well.  At this point one student put up her hand and said that she thought the pattern could also be "Term number x 2 = Term Value"  The students set off to explore if this theory worked for different term numbers in this pattern. 

When they came back they decided that yes, for this pattern that pattern rule worked and they could now be given any term number and find out any term value they needed to.  They then added to the anchor chart by adding the number from this pattern to the table of values so they could refer to it at a later time.
From this lesson, Brian decided to continue on to see what else the students knew about different representations about patterns.  That will be his next lesson.