Free Pattern Activities for Winter Preschool Theme

Looking for a quick patterning activity to add to your winter preschool lesson plans? These free printable pattern cards will fit in perfectly to your winter math activities for preschoolers. You can even add them to your kindergarten activities!

Be sure to read how to get five different preschool math activities for winter out of this single printable!

Preschool Math Activities for Winter Using FREE Patterning Cards
Grab your free download at the end of this post.


Looking to add a touch of winter wonder to your preschooler’s learning experience? These free printable pattern cards are the perfect solution! Not only are they fun and engaging, but they also provide a valuable opportunity for your child to develop essential preschool math skills.

By recognizing and understanding patterns, children develop essential problem-solving and critical thinking skills. It helps them make connections between different concepts, identify sequences, and predict outcomes. Additionally, pattern recognition lays the foundation for future mathematical and scientific understanding.

By introducing patterns early on, we empower young learners to become more confident and capable thinkers.

FAQ About Teaching Patterning to Preschoolers

How do you explain patterns to preschoolers?

Patterns can be anything that repeats in a logical way. For example, vertical stripes on someone’s sweater create a pattern. Patterns can be made up of anything, including numbers, images or shapes, as long as they follow a the ultimate patterning rule: that it is repetitive!

Learn all about patterning in this post: The Ultimate Guide to Teaching Positions and Patterns.

What order should I teach patterns?

Patterns range in complexity, so in preschool and kindergarten, you’ll find the most success if you start with simple patterns and work your way up to longer, more complex patterns. Here is a good order to go by:

~ AB
~ ABC
~ AABB
~ AAB
~ ABB

These patterns are all practiced in my Daily Lessons in Positions and Patterns Math Unit.

What are the stages of development in patterning skills?

There are many different levels to teaching and learning pattern skills, here’s the developmental sequence for teaching patterning skills to your Preschool or Pre-K students.

~ Stage 1: Recognize a pattern
~ Stage 2: Describe a pattern
~ Stage 3: Copy a pattern
~ Stage 4: Extend a pattern
~ Stage 5: Create a pattern

I would so add that a sixth stage could be created: Filling in a missing pattern pieces.

Have you tried our Santa Math Activities with patterning cards?

5 Preschool Math Activities for Winter

If you’re a regular reader, then you know how I love having a printable that will do multiple jobs. While this is a winter patterning activity, I’ll also share with your four additional ways to use this printable, beyond the straight-forward patterning work.

What You Get with This Freebie

With this free winter patterning printable, you get four full color pages of pattern practice cards. Each page has four cards, giving you eight AB pattern cards and eight ABC pattern cards.

Materials

  • Free winter patterning cards
  • Colorful math manipulatives (optional)

Setting Up Your Preschool Math Activities

I like to introduce most activities like these during circle time and then add them to my math center after introducing them to the class.

Lay the patterning cards in a pile on a tray or work area. Set out the winter pictures to complete the pattern next the to cards, You can put them in a sorting bowl or on a tray or just leave them scattered about.

I find they usually get scattered anyway, so I lay them about the work space so that my preschoolers can easily see the pictures.

Now invite your preschoolers to have some winter math fun with you!

pattern cards to use for Preschool Math Activities for Winter
There are multiple pattern types included in these pattern worksheets…I mean, pattern cards.

How to Teach Patterns to Preschoolers

If your preschoolers are unfamiliar with some of the images, first allow them to look through the pile of picture cards. They will naturally name the pictures they know and ask about the ones they don’t. (What? A wooden sled?!) This is also an important step in developing oral language skills.

When your child is ready, invite him to select a patterning card from the pile. Have her “read” the pattern aloud by pointing to each picture in order, thus hearing the pattern, too.

Snowman, mittens, snowman, mittens, snowman…

And then invite your preschooler to search through the pile of picture cards to find the mittens card that will complete the pattern.

Some of the pictures come in a few different colors, so your preschooler will have the added challenge of finding the snowman with the red scarf and not the green, for example.

Preschool Math Activities for Winter - child completing pattern
You can use cute winter manipulatives to complete the patters, or use the winter pictures that come with the free printable.

Check out our free Fall Pattern Cards!

A More Challenging Winter Pattern Cards Activity

One way to make this printable more challenging for you preschoolers is to invite them to continue the pattern off the card. Disclaimer: this will also require you to print out a few more copies of the picture card pages.

Having your preschooler continue the pattern off the card gives them even more practice in visual discrimination skills, as well as sorting skills and patterning. For more ideas, check out this post about simple ways to teach patterns to preschoolers.

Preschool Math Activities for Winter - patterning
Even in simple patterns, children learn various math concepts, like extending patterns.

This patterning extension activity is just one of many that I included in my Positions and Patterns Lesson Plans. You can grab my Sorting Lesson Plans here, too!

To Simplify the Winter Pattern Cards

Some preschoolers, especially younger preschoolers, struggle with patterning, so having extra activities to practice patterns is important. Make this activity more simple by having young children match the picture cards under the pattern cards, thus repeating the pattern underneath. Then, have them fill in the remaining places in the pattern.

Again, this gives your preschooler lots of sorting and visual discrimination practice, but now they also have two patterns to read aloud, which means that they can hear, (and play with) the pattern twice.

Our Ultimate Guide to Teaching Patterns tells all!

Free Printable Pattern Activities for Kindergarten

While you can take this printable as face value, I always like to think up alternate ways to use my printables. Here are two more learning activities for your preschoolers and kindergarteners!

While we spend a lot of time in preschool learning about patterns, patterning math skills are also important for kindergarten students to practice too.

Patterning Practice That Transfers

It’s important for preschoolers to understand the concept of patterning is something that repeats itself. It’s A, B, A, B…and not always tree, gingerbread house, tree…

One way I like to teach this to my preschoolers is by using math manipulatives and having them assign a color, for example, to each picture and make the pattern underneath the pattern card.

Then, a pattern like

Snowballs, sled, snowballs, sled, snowballs…

Is also understood as

Red, green, red, green, red…

This helps preschoolers transfer the knowledge of an AB pattern from one scenario to another.

And this set of winter patterning cards also include ABC patterns, too!

Preschool Math Activities for Winter - multiple pattern cards
Add these pattern cards to your winter math activities for preschoolers.

Use Winter Patterning Cards for Sorting

Patterning leads so nicely into sorting, as it should because they both fall under the same math domain of algebra.

The clip art images on this set of winter patterning cards is so beautiful that they’re fun use in so many different preschool math activities for winter. You can sort them into a variety of categories, but my all time favorite way to use the cards for sorting is to invite my preschoolers to sort them into categories they define themselves. I am always surprised by their creativity.

Get Your Free Winter Patterning Cards Here

Think these patterning cards are something you want to add to your preschool math center or small group preschool math activities?