Superhero Pattern Stones

One of the favourite topics that J’s school focused on last year was superhero’s and we’re so happy that our topic this week as part of the 2nd grade blogging team is Super Heroes especially as we’re currently out in Orlando and surrounded by Marvel Superheroes. Inspired by the colours we’ve seen we’ve got creative and made some superhero pattern stones that are ideal for working on sequences and patterns.

Learning Objectives

Our Learning objectives are coming direct from the UK government objectives for Key Stage 1 children (year 1 and 2 – 1st and 2nd grade).

• Can order and arrange combinations of mathematical objects in patterns and sequences.
• Can name the primary and secondary colours.

Materials needed

Selection of Stones

Primary Coloured Acrylic Paint & Painting Equipment

White paper to lay out patterns on

Preparation

The kids loved preparing the stones – first they set off around the garden collecting similar size and shape stones and then we set to painting them.

 

 

I divided the stones between the three kids and they then each painted them a different colour – we will be using these stones for different activities throughout the year so each of the Kindergarten, 1st grade and 2nd grader took part taking one of the primary colours to paint their stones.

If you’ve never seen progressing in painting styles between the 3 grades, just observing their palettes after they have finished painting shows some of the development in the art skills as you can see in the image below.

The stone were then set aside to dry.

Superhero Pattern Stones

I knew that J had done patterning in school but I wasn’t sure at what level he had worked out so I started off by setting up a simple repeating pattern of only 2 colours and one element of each colour. Discovering that this was easy for him, we quickly moved on to a more complicated pattern.

With the patterns I set up the sequence and then started the first part of the repeat of the sequence before handing over to J to complete.

With the pattern complete – we worked on progressively harder sequences of the three colours.

As we discovered J loves to recognise patterns and continue the sequence – so we moved onto him creating his own sequence to start off with.

Then continuing the sequence to when he ran out of stones.

Differentiation

Simplify

• Start with only 2 colours
• Progress from alternative pattern to 2:1 sequence, 2:2, 3:1, 3:2, 3:3 etc
• Introduce a 3 colour sequence with a 1:1:1 ratio and progress from there

Moving forward

• Using the same stones add to them using a sharpie marker – you could add superhero symbols – so 2 red had the Spiderman web, 2 Superman and 2 Captain America, or shapes 2 squares, 2 circles, 2 triangles
• Use the shapes and colours to create the sequence so there are two variables in the pattern that have to be followed.

More Superhero-Inspired Activities for Second Grade

Check out this week’s Superhero inspired activities for your second grade (year 2) students from the 2nd-grade blogging team.