STAIRCASES
Staircases are very potent mathematical constructions.
Staircases:
- help fix the mental image of the rods in your child’s mind;
- improve memory recall
- prepare for the introduction of number and place value;
- can introduce the early concept of fractions.
Quite probably children will have already begun to construct staircases with the rods during FREE PLAY.
Call the rods by their color names.
Later, when all the signs have been introduced, children will write sentences using the letter-names of the rods.
Explain that because the color names begin with a certain initial letter they will be given that letter name.
We call brown ’tan’ because we already have a black (b) and a blue (B).
Because blue is bigger we write the initial letter in upper case.
Tan becomes ’t’.
There is an important link to language development here that we will look at later.
If children have not made any staircases ask them to make a set of stairs starting with the smallest rod (white) and finishing with the largest (orange).
Children will quite possibly have already made a staircase like the one below.
The sequence is:
w, r, g, p, y, d, b, t, B, o
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 10
Once we have introduced the ‘number names’ of the rods the white will, most of the time but not always, represent 1.
It is vital that the rods are not seen to represent a particular number.
For example when introducing fractions we may decide to call red ‘one’.
We will look at this next.
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