I hosted my first Family Math Night event of the school year last week. I had 33 student station facilitators – the most ever! It’s so exciting when kids volunteer to spend an evening doing math.

I also had a new What Do You Notice? poster. Here’s the skinny…

Title: Number Grid Pattern

Skills
K-2: number recognition, pattern
3-5: pattern, addition

Background Information: My youngest son visited the Basilica Sagrada Familia, a Roman Catholic Church in Barcelona, Spain and brought this pattern back for me as a gift. Here’s a photo of his gift: (And before you read the next paragraph where I describe the main pattern, you may want to discover your own patterns first.)

Having done a lot of these types of puzzles, it didn’t take me long to figure out the all rows, columns, and diagonals add to 33. It just so happens that 33 was the age of Jesus when he died.

The second and third columns are interesting. Notice how they both have the numbers ’14’ and ’10’. The second column includes ‘7’ and ‘2’. The third column includes ‘6’ which is one less than ‘7’ and ‘3’ which is one more than ‘2’. Number sense tells us that both columns, therefore, should add to the same number – which they do.

Younger students can focus on number recognition, repeated numbers, finding the number that represents their age, etc.

Here’s what it looked like at the event: