These bright, engaging Science Pattern Match Cards contain 89 nature-themed illustrated cards and 48 accompany science inquiry Task Cards and are designed to help early years students recognise patterns in nature.

Recognising patterns is an early years skill that helps children with science inquiry and science understanding skills as they learn to make inferences about natural processes. Pattern-recognition is a pathway to predicting phenomena. These curriculum-aligned, science-based game cards strengthen lower years scientific inquiry skills by suggesting subtle connections between natural objects and events. Students select and match cards based on the Task Cards, or on simple inferences, which they then justify.

While some three-card matches may be suggested by the initial design, many cards can be ‘matched’ in various ways, depending onwhich ‘pattern’ the student has chosen. The connections may be based on similarities and differences in life cycle, habitat, species type, living or non-living things, natural or constructed objects, or time or geological and natural processes, such as day and night, storms or fire. There is often no single answer for matching the cards into ‘sets’.

This teaching resource provides handy prompts to encourage inference. Blanks of both the illustrative cards and the task cards have been provided for teachers to customise and create their own.