Nursery World - Enabling Environments: Let's explore ... Pattern

Sometimes overlooked or left to art activities, pattern is fundamental to children's understanding of mathematics, says Judith Stevens.

Patterns are all around us in everyday life, in the natural and built environment. Individual children, or a group of children, may have become interested in patterns for various reasons. Perhaps their early years setting has been enhanced through the addition of new cushions, curtains or other soft furnishings, or one of the children has a new patterned jumper.

Pattern covers aspects of all six areas of Learning and Development within the Early Years Foundation Stage. It especially provides lots of opportunities to extend children's creative development and explore problem solving, reasoning and numeracy, an area that practitioners sometimes interpret as being more about numbers and calculating than about shapes, space, measures and patterns (see box). As a result, pattern and shape unfortunately are often either overlooked or introduced in a limited and uninspired manner.

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