Dear parent or guardian: This is a summary of the key ideas your child is learning in mathematics.

You can use this summary as background as you support your child’s work.

Building Decreasing Patterns

2
Decreasing Patterns
Like increasing patterns, decreasing patterns involve a predictable change from term
to term. With decreasing patterns, the values of the terms become smaller as you go
further along.

For example:
100, 95, 90, 85, 80, … (where you skip count back by 5s) is a decreasing pattern.
It is a pattern because the subtracting of 5 repeats every term.

Decreasing patterns can also be based on objects, sounds, or actions.

Here are two examples of decreasing patterns:

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© 2020 Rubicon Publishing Inc. Grade 3 • Patterns 1

 2 Building Decreasing Patterns (continued)

Notes
When working with concrete objects or actions, decreasing patterns cannot go on
indefinitely, unlike increasing patterns. That said, numerical decreasing patterns can
continue indefinitely, once students know negative numbers.

Definitions
decreasing (shrinking) pattern: a pattern where the number of items in each term
or the value of each term decreases in a predictable way, for example, 20, 18, 16, 14, …

term (pattern): each element in a pattern

© 2020 Rubicon Publishing Inc. Grade 3 • Patterns 2