The purpose of this activity is to engage students in continuing a sequential pattern and identifying a specific term in that pattern.
This activity assumes the students have experience in the following areas:
The problem is sufficiently open ended to allow the students freedom of choice in their approach. It may be scaffolded with guidance that leads to a solution, and/or the students might be given the opportunity to solve the problem independently.
The example responses at the end of the resource give an indication of the kind of response to expect from students who approach the problem in particular ways.
A knitting pattern gives instructions for a row of 47 stitches as ‘Knit 2, Purl 3 then repeat’.
This means the row will be k k p p p k k p p p k k p p p… for 47 stitches.
What will the last stitch on the row be? A knit or a purl?
The following prompts illustrate how this activity can be structured around the phases of the Mathematics Investigation Cycle.
Introduce the problem. Allow students time to read it and discuss in pairs or small groups.
Discuss ideas about how to solve the problem. Emphasise that, in the planning phase, you want students to say how they would solve the problem, not to actually solve it.
Allow students time to work through their strategy and find a solution to the problem.
Allow students time to check their answers and then either have them pair share with other groups or ask for volunteers to share their solution with the class.
The student creates a sequence of letter symbols and continues the pattern until the 47th stitch is found.
Click on the image to enlarge it. Click again to close.
The student recognises that the unit of repeat is k, k, p, p, p. They skip count in fives to find the nearest complete pattern to 47 (45 stitches). The continue the pattern two stitches to find the 47th stitch.
Printed from https://nzmaths.co.nz/resource/knitting-patterns at 7:28am on the 1st May 2024