I can’t believe my little girl is moving into the “preschool” age group, but it’s actually happening!  I tend to define (in my head) “toddler” as one- and two-year-olds, “preschool” as three- and four-year-olds, and “school-aged” as five and up, and L will be three in just a few short weeks!

I have had our Lego Patterns work out for a while now, but L was ready for something new.  For toddlers, those templates work perfectly because there are no blank spaces to fill in.  For older children, you may want to mix it up a bit to make it more of a challenge.

I found the cutest little heart pasta while grocery shopping last week, so of course I bought some — but not to eat!  Pasta is actually a great tool for Montessori-inspired works — it’s perfect for transfer works like spooning or dry pouring.  Since these ones are so cute and it’s almost Valentine’s day, I decided to make some pattern templates to use with them as a math work.  Don’t worry if you can’t find this exact heart pasta — you can use any objects you have as long as you have enough objects in each color.

The heart pasta I found only came in two different colors, so I was restricted to using AB patterns (if A=red pasta and B=yellow pasta).  I traced the pasta in a line and colored the hearts in the two colors to make the following patterns:  ABABAB, ABBABB, AABAAB, and AAABAAAB.  If you have objects of three different colors, you could do ABCABC, ABBCABBC, AABCAABC, ACABACAB, or any combination of the three colors as long as the pattern repeats.

I left the final three hearts of each pattern blank so that L would have to figure out what would come next in the pattern’s progression.  The first pattern (ABABAB) was easy for her to figure out, but she did have some trouble with the more complex patterns.

This is super easy for you to do yourself using whatever objects you have handy — just trace the objects and color them in the appropriate colors.  If you are moderately capable on the computer, you could also do it that way.  You don’t even need to have the appropriate shape for the objects — this pattern work would work just as well if I had simply put circles or squares on the paper for L to put the hearts on.