Try these Pink Tower / Brown Stairs extension activities to boost your child’s focus, spark creative thinking, and enjoy peaceful homeschool days together.
Do your kids love the traditional pink tower and brown stair blocks? This activity breathes fresh life into your classic homeschool materials. Your child will combine two separate block sets into beautiful new patterns. You do not need to buy brand new toys for your preschooler. Instead, you can use these clever extension ideas to challenge their growing brain. This activity builds deep concentration because your child must carefully match the dimensions of each block piece.
Once the child has mastered the Pink Tower (read a post here) and Brown Stairs (read a post here) separately, you would start introducing extensions of these activities, by combining the two. (Buy the Pink Tower here and Brown Stairs here.)
Adrian at 27 months working on Pink Tower & Brown Stairs Extension:
Building Pink Tower & Brown Stairs vertically.
Adrian at 30 months:
A material incorporating “control of error” allows a child to check his own work and self-correct if needed.
Adrian runs his index finger across Pink Tower’s cube and a Brown Stair to see if they are the same height.
Building Pink Tower & Brown Stairs horizontally.
The Pink Tower & Brown Stairs when laid correctly would align in height.
Building Pink Tower & Brown Stairs horizontally on an angle.
Adrian at 33 months, working with Julia, 6 and-a-half:
Here, Julia is improvising, making her own design.
Adrian at 34 months:
Adrian at 36 months:
Not that long ago, Adrian attempted this particular combination, and he could not do it.
At 36 months, he is confident and precise.
Adrian at 42 months assembled this extension to honor the 🌐 Earth Day.
Children’s engineering skills have led to this extension!
I ❤️️love how certain traditional Montessori Sensorial materials have math intertwined in them, exposing children to early algebra and geometry. It is such a joy seeing my 👦🏼👧🏻children work together on Pink Tower & Brown Stair extensions, while also developing their engineering skills.
Pink Tower consists of 10 pink wooden cubes with width graduated in increments from 1 cm (which is 3/8″ on each side) to 10 cm or 1 cubic centimeter to 1 cubic decimeter. Any 2 successive cubes vary in 3 dimensions: length, width and height, thus making their difference in size reasonably obvious to a child. Pink Tower is a material for teaching size, where cubes increase progressively in the algebraic series of the third power according to the numerical series.
Brown Stair however is for teaching thickness. While the length of the stairs (prisms) remains constant, the square section of the broad stair varies: sides of the square sections vary according to the series of natural numbers, i.e., in the 1st stair, the square of the section has sides of 1 cm, in the 2nd of 2 cm, in the 3rd of 3 cm, etc.. The stairs therefore are in the same proportion to one another as the numbers of the series of squares (1, 4, 9, etc.), for it would take 4 stairs of the 1st size to make the 2nd, 9 to make the 3rd, etc. The pieces which make up the series for teaching thickness are therefore in the following proportion: 1 : 4 : 9 : 16 : 25 : 36 : 49 : 64 : 81 : 100..
Wow 😳 that is a lot for playing with cubes and prisms!
What extensions do you do with your child?
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