In IM Grade 3, students identified patterns in arithmetic and used mathematical operations to explain them. In this lesson and the next few, students continue the work of identifying and explaining patterns by generating shape patterns that follow a given rule and looking for features of these patterns that are not explicit in the rule itself.

The visual patterns in this lesson follow rules that increase the number of shapes in each step. In this lesson, students describe what they notice in the patterns in ways that make sense to them. This may include describing the ways each term “grows” using informal language such as “bigger,” “taller,” “grows faster,” and so on. Students are also encouraged to notice what they can quantify in each term of the pattern and explain what they notice when listing these numbers. Students are also invited to make predictions by looking for and making use of structure (MP7), rather than by drawing or writing out each step along the way.

Reflect on whose thinking was heard today. Reflect on whose thinking was not heard but could have enriched the conversations. What prompts or structures might better enable the latter to share their voices and reasoning?