Broad Stair
This is an activity where children will be taught to grade ten wooden prisms differentiating in breadth and height but same in colour and width, from biggest to smallest.
How the Broad Stair is built
The directress will assist the child in bringing the broad stair to the floor mat one by one holding it correctly with two hands. The directress will take her time to find the biggest one and place it on the far left-hand side of the floor mat, then continue looking for the next biggest prism and placing it next to the biggest one to its right.
She will run her right index and middle fingers along the side for alignment. Once completed, she will run her fingers down the stair and invite the child to have a turn, as well as taking the smallest prism and fitting it in correctly after each prism to check if it is built correctly; if not then something went wrong.
What do children learn by doing the Broad Stair?
There are many different skills children will indirectly learn by doing the Broad Stair, for example, they will learn how to discriminate differences in sizes, hand-eye co-ordination, the children become more patient and their concentration improves and children will learn to work one on one with the directress.
Looking for more Montessori activities?
Here is the full list of the Montessori tasks, including Visual and Muscle Discrimination Sense activities, Tactile Sense activities, Chromatic Sense activities, Auditory Sense activities, Thermic Sense activities, Gustatory Sense activities, Baric Sense activities, Olfactory Sense activities, Stereognostic Sense activities, Geometry activities, and Algebra activities. Just click on the activity you want to learn about to go there.