Sorting and Patterns with Beads

A big pile of plastic beads and we were set for an hour of fun! A separated all these beads into different coloured piles. She was particularly excited about the four shades of pink she found. She also liked the fluoro yellow and fluoro green beads, though she called them “blue-ray” colours 🙂

Sorting.

More sorting.

The sorted piles.

Once she had sorted all the colours out we compared the size of each pile. She showed me the biggest piles and the smallest piles. She also counted the number of beads in the smaller piles. We talked about some of the shapes she could see too. Some of the beads were round, some heart shaped, some looked like flowers, and she even found a red butterfly.

We used the beads to practice making patterns. I set out some simple two and three colour patterns and asked A to place the next bead. She liked doing that, and then she made up some of her own patterns with the beads.