Collaborative Patterns with Recycled Materials

This lesson was such a beautiful mess! I asked kindergarten students to work together to create patterns using recycled materials.  We started out the session talking about patterns.  They have just started to really concentrate on this in their Math curriculum so they were familiar with AB, ABB and ABC patterns.  That's when I rolled out the cart of caps.

I created this video to show students because when I was showing them 'live' they said it was hard to see. I thought about adding some magnets to the back side of some caps too to show the patterns on the whiteboard too... I still might do this but didn't have time in the day.

I spread out the students around the room using large format sheets of paper.  I asked them to work as teams of two (their choice).  They would go to the center of the room where the carts were to get their supplies. You can see on the smartboard I have the timer set.  Students must continue to work on their artwork until the timer went off.

When the timer went off I would go around the room to take their pictures.  I shared this with parents on +Seesaw to show the teams that they were working in.  I also took a top view of the artwork and shared a collage of the works made on +PicCollage. The end result was really beautiful. 

I left about 15 minutes for clean up. I asked these little K's to sort them for me, find all the caps that might have rolled away, and collect the paper.  It was accomplished with a little organized chaos. Very fun, and low-cost project.