Pattern Block Activities

My kids love when we get fun reviews, especially in the summer! I want my kids to make learning a daily habit to prepare for a lifetime of knowledge. That's why we don't truly stop "school" in the summer months, but rather alter our schedule to focus on crafts, skills, and hands-on activities.  

The Pattern Block Activity Bundle from the Crafty Classroom is our perfect summertime learning. It's simple, hands-on, educational, and fun! 

The Crafty Classroom offers all sorts of downloadable curricula to help your students, including ways to learn the alphabet, Bible, geography, math, reading, science, and writing. There is super sequences, color science, ASL alphabet, U.S.A. mazes, writing prompts, The 10 Commandments, and so much more. Just browsing through the options makes me want to buy all the curriculum. It all looks so fun! As a homeschooling family with their own four kids, the Crafty Classroom has designed their materials to make teaching easier by making them "fun, interactive, and low-prep."

The downloadable Pattern Block Activity Bundle meets all those qualifications. The hardest part of using it is deciding which pages to print! The bundle comes with over 230 unique designs which cover the following topics:

• Uppercase Alphabet
• Lowercase Alphabet
• Numbers
• Animals (farm, forest, ocean, zoo)
• Holidays (New Year's, Valentine's, St. Patrick's, Earth Day, Easter, July 4th, Thanksgiving, Christmas)
• Seasons
• Transportation

Each of the designs is offered for 3 levels of difficulty. The easiest one shows the blocks with color; the next level shows the blocks with no color; the hardest one shows just the outline of the design.

The are an additional 8 pages of follow-up activities to extend the learning by encouraging logic, reading, writing, and math skills. These bonus pages can accompany any of the design pages or can be used for independent building.

There are activities to draw the build, write about it, compare blocks, graph blocks, games, and more.

Pattern blocks can be used at any age (hey, even I like to build when the kids do!), but it's generally more appealing to the younger crowd. While my daughter (11 yrs) has recreated the designs a few times, my boys (ages 9, 7, 4) have spent hours building and rebuilding.

There are different ways you can print and store the pages. I chose to print them full page and keep them in page protectors in a 3-ringed binder. Instead of printing the entire bundle with 731 pages, I chose various designs from each level. We keep them divided by level in the binder so it's easy for the kids to find what they want.

Also, I tried printing on both sides of the page, but I found the ink showed through too much, at least on our regular printer paper. A heavier paper might be fine for double-sided printing.

I find my kids building with the blocks multiple times a day. Their favorite way to use them is to recreate the design next to the page instead of directly on top. I love that added level of difficulty!

Another thing they have started to do is build on to the original designs, like putting the owl in a tree, creating flowers for the bees, and making the elephant spray water. Not only are they showing creativity, but honing pattern and spatial skills, as well.

I have found that the boys will use all levels of difficulty, but the medium is their favorite. It has just a hint of complication without having to think too much. I guess it is summer, after all, ha.

I have seen many pattern block pages over the years and own a few different sets. This one from the Crafty Classroom though has a greater variety of pages--porcupine, lobster, hot chocolate, beetle, sandcastle, mushroom, pot of gold, recycle sign, Statue of Liberty, parachute--and hundreds more. This one bundle can easily cover all your design idea needs.     

The Pattern Block Activity Bundle is a fantastic set. It has a large selection of designs, 3 levels of difficulty for each one, and comes with additional learning pages. It truly is "fun, interactive, and low-prep." I know that we will use this set for many years.

You can connect with the Crafty Classroom on the following social media sites:

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The Crafty Classroom offers many fun and excellent products to help learning, like the Learn to R.E.A.D. Curriculum that we reviewed a couple years ago, a Bible Letter of the Week, a literary unit for Fables and Fairy Tales, a 3-book bundle fill with activities about the U.S.A, and much more.

Make sure to head over to the Homeschool Review Crew blog to read more reviews of these products and more that other homeschool families have been using this summer.