Algebra sounds like secondary school, but its roots are much earlier. At heart, algebraic thinking is noticing structure: seeing what stays the same, what changes, and predicting what comes next. A three-year-old threading beads red-blue-red-blue is doing exactly that.
Researchers have taken repeating patterns seriously for this reason, and the findings are encouraging for parents, because pattern play is cheap, calm and fun.
What the research shows
In a study following children from low-income families from age four to eleven, Rittle-Johnson and colleagues found that early patterning knowledge was a unique predictor of children’s maths achievement at age eleven (around the end of fifth grade in the US), alongside other early maths skills.
A follow-up study found that patterning predicted preschoolers’ maths knowledge over and above their general reasoning ability. Patterns, in other words, are not just a sign of a bright child; they seem to tap something specifically mathematical: seeing structure and regularity.
As always, prediction is not proof that pattern games alone cause later success. But it is a good reason to make room for them.
Three steps of pattern play
- Copy: you make a short pattern with bricks or pasta, and your child builds the same one next to it.
- Extend: “Red, blue, red, blue… what comes next?” Let them carry on as far as they like.
- Find the unit: “Which bit keeps repeating?” Spotting the core (red-blue) is the step towards abstract thinking.
- Translate: turn a colour pattern into a clap-stamp pattern, or a sound into shapes. Same structure, new form.
Patterns in an ordinary day
Clapping games and action songs are patterns you can hear and feel. Bead threading, fence railings, paving stones and tiles are patterns you can see. Even routine is a pattern: wash, teeth, story, bed.
Naming them as you go, “it goes big step, little step, big step”, is what turns noticing into thinking.
Growing patterns come a little later: one block, two blocks, three blocks. Asking “how many next time?” gently introduces the idea that a rule can describe change.
Keep it light
Mistakes in a pattern are interesting, not wrong. “Oh, a green one! Does it still repeat?” invites your child to check their own thinking. Short, playful moments, often, will do more than any worksheet.