Dancing Our Math!

Arkansas is a wonderful place for dancing.  Specifically, doing the “Arkansas Traveler Dance” in an Our Time class. It’s a memory-making time of whole-class fun that lays the foundation for mathematical success!

The dance follows a pattern.  We circle round the room, tap our toes, go in & out, and swing our partners.  Then we repeat those steps, in that same order each time.  You’ll find patterned dances throughout all of our Kindermusik classes!

You can dance your patterns at home, too.  You can also look around you and point out patterns to your child.  Look for patterns in nature (such as zebra stripes), on the your clothes and soles of your shoes, and all around (floor tiles, wall paper, ceiling tiles…) The elements of our daily routines follow a pattern.  Eating is a great example:  breakfast, lunch, dinner – repeat.

With preschoolers, you can create and extend patterns.  Move to a pattern: jump, step, jump, step.  Create a food patterns at snack time: cracker, raisin, cheese cube, cracker, raisin…  Children love stickers and rubber stamps and they are perfect for making a pattern on paper.

Recognizing patterns and adding to them lays the groundwork children need to understand mathematics. Later in school, this foundation helps them understand things such as why a particular method of calculation works (or doesn’t) and the reason one side of a triangle is always related to the other two sides.

“Mathematics is an exploratory science that seeks to understand every kind of pattern–patterns that occur in nature, patterns invented by the human mind, and even patterns created by other patterns. To grow mathematically, children must be exposed to a rich variety of patterns appropriate to their own lives through which they can see variety, regularity, and interconnections.” – Lynn Arthur Steen, On the Shoulders of Giants

-posted by Miss Anita, who as a former first and second grade teacher, knows that patterns are the foundation of math (and of language!)