Teaching with Patterns

Part of what I love so much about math is the patterns. There are patterns in just about everything, and it simply amazes me at how much you can trust the patterns. Because I naturally love this characteristic of math, it's super easy for me to interest kids in discovering them. I'm always on the lookout for a new pattern I've never seen before, or a new way to use a pattern to help students master concepts or just simply become interested in topics. After 3 years of private tutoring, I've encountered at least 5 high school students and more than 10 elementary students who needed help mastering basic facts. They could not accomplish the tasks at hand because they didn't know simple addition or multiplication, divisibility rules or counting patterns. So I've gathered some of my favorite patterns and teaching ideas to share with you. I can't take credit for any of these, because, well, quite frankly, I didn't invent math ;) Here they are: Everyone knows the finger trick for counting by nines, but even that confused some of my students, until I showed them how to count like this...

But what about after the 10th number Miss Stefany?
        I just show them this...

.....read on