Thinking about patterns can be organised around some big ideas: patterns are everywhere, mathematical patterns are regular, patterns repeat, patterns can grow and patterns can be found in shapes.
Patterns and algebra is a substrand of the Number and Algebra strand of the Australian Curriculum: Mathematics. However, patterning ideas arise in other substrands of this strand, and also in the Measurement and Geometry and the Statistics and Probability strands. Many of the substrands can be approached from the ideas of patterns. You can look at a list of content descriptions from the Foundation year through to year 3 in Patterns and their Applications in the Australian Curriculum: Mathematics.
We are going to look at the big ideas of patterns that thread through the various substrands of the curriculum. The big ideas included in the Patterns drawer embrace a large proportion of the separate content descriptions for each year level. So each big idea helps in thinking about many topics in the curriculum.
Focussing on the big ideas can also help integrate the different strands. In particular, patterns can link many ideas in number and geometry.
