The Brown Stairs

Decorative Wave

Sensorial Materials in the Montessori Classroom – Part 2

This is part two of a multi part blog about sensorial Montessori curriculum. At Arbor View Montessori we use Sensorial Materials in the Montessori classroom that increases the child’s awareness and helps the child form more distinguished impressions of their surroundings. This week we present:

The Brown Stairs

The Brown Stairs introduces the child to difference in size in two dimensions. This is a set of ten prisms with a constant length of twenty centimeters, but whose width and height both vary from one centimeter to ten centimeters. Again the child must place the blocks in proper graduation forming a stair-like structure. With this exercise, the teacher introduces the concepts of thickness and thinness, using the terms – thick, thicker, thickest and thin, thinner, thinnest, with the corresponding blocks as concrete examples.