Name Bracelet Patterning Craft

Learning to pattern is a fun thing for most preschoolers, and it is full of learning too! We have been busy practicing this skill in our home in many different ways—with toys, with movements, and the favourite way, with bracelets. My boys love making bracelets. Ben, who is 2, practices threading beads on to pipe cleaners when he makes them. The pipe cleaners are sturdy, and makes it simpler for him to thread the beads. Sam, who is 4, will make bracelets out of string, yarn, or anything at all that he can string a bead on to. Since we have done quite a few activities with patterning, and Sammy is becoming quite confident in this skill, I thought we would try a neat twist. I made these name pattern bracelets with my Kindergarten class a few years ago and they were a big hit, so I thought we would give them a try at home. This activity is a wonderful learning activity for little ones. They are learning to create a colour pattern based on letters. This is a skill that will be taught at a much later age in school, but this activity will provide them with a wonderful experience to draw on down the road.

For this activity, we used letter beads and coloured beads. Of course, you could simply write letters onto plain beads if you do not have letter beads.

First, Sammy thread his name letters onto a string. Next, he chose out one colour for each different letter of his name (so 4 colours, since 2 of his name letters {m} are the same). Sammy decided which colour bead would represent each letter and began his pattern. He decided S = green, A= pink, M = blue, Y= yellow. So the base of his pattern was green, pink, blue, blue, yellow.

It was fascinating to me that this pattern seemed a little tricky for Sam. It was a rather basic pattern, but because we added in the step of creating it from letters he seemed to get a little more mixed up then usual. Once he repeated the pattern a few times he got into the rhythm of the pattern and finished smoothly.

We decided to make a name pattern bracelet for Ben as well.  My original thought was to have Sam try to make a pattern from Ben's full name BENJAMIN, but with how tricky the name 'Sammy' was, I thought that would be rather cruel. Creating the name Ben was nice and simple, perhaps where we should have started in the first place. It often surprises me how changing one seemingly tiny thing can really affect how little ones learn.

Sammy proudly wore his name bracelet all day. He also wanted to proudly wear Ben's name bracelet (since he did create it) but decided—eventually—to gift the bracelet to his brother.

I love activities that end with a little token children can proudly wear or display. These name pattern bracelets provided exactly that.