Notice and Recognise

Progress examples to help you notice & recognise a child’s progress.

Use the phases of progress (outlined below) to help you notice and recognise a child’s progress.

Children respond to patterns they experience through familiar routines and their senses such as in dance, waiata, games, images, and nature.
Children begin to anticipate and recognise regular patterns in a range of contexts.
Children enjoy the regularity and repetition of patterns. They recognise, copy and repeat simple patterns in rhymes, song, dance, movement, and stories.
Children begin to express a preference for particular objects, shapes and natural materials.

Children explore and copy simple repeating patterns through playful participation in routines and experiences such as waiata, rhymes, dance, games, and shared books.
Children notice and communicate about specific patterns in their environment such as the stripes on a T-shirt, kōwhaiwhai, or veins of leaves.
Children recognise relationships in pattern including sameness, difference and repetition and begin to make predictions about how patterns might continue.
Children create simple patterns with a range of familiar objects, shapes, and natural materials.

Children express themselves through patterns using language, sounds and movements. They recognise patterns associated with time, nature, seasons, and routines.
Children create patterns in a range of contexts using different objects, materials and spatial arrangements.
Children use relationships in pattern including sameness and difference to sort a collection of objects in ways that reflect simple repeated patterns and sequences. They recognise sameness in patterns and can describe how they have organised objects to make a pattern.
Children create or recreate specific patterns in their play, including those with a repeating element such as in a string of beads, repeated colours or shapes when painting. They communicate about and describe their patterns.

Children recognise, design, adapt and create increasingly complex patterns in familiar music and dance. Children become aware of experiences related to longer patterns of time such as Matariki cycle or seasons, alongside maths systems or symbols used in calendars, graphs, and timelines.
Children confidently explain a pattern in shared activities such as collage, drawing, and games. They collaborate with others in patterned experiences.
Children recognise the repeated parts of patterns that they have designed and created. They can recognise relationships in patterns to predict, continue and extend a range of patterns including complex patterns in different contexts.
Children collaborate to pose and solve problems about patterns. They are playful and inventive when they use patterns for a purpose including creating or re-creating different representations of a range of patterns.