List some activities/tasks/exercises that you would give a class of 50 children to do to make them aware about patterns, and to articulate what the patterns are.

You must be wondering about why we haven't spoken about one of the essentials of mathematical thinking, that is, the ability to go from particular to general and vice versa. For a child to develop this ability, after a certain stage she needs to learn how to deal with formal mathematics. What are the processes she needs to go through to become comfortable with symbols and abstract concepts? We discuss this in the following section.