Educational Insights has a helpful educational tool called the Magnetic Metric Staircase.

What is there not to love about an over-sized magnetic board?  But seriously, this board is great for many reasons:

• it is magnetic so it is easy to use
• it is flat so it stores easily
• it has bright colors and  cute designs to appeal to children.
• it is great for visual learners and kinesthetic (hands on) learners

This great educational tool can help you teach various math concepts with a fun, hands on technique.  Obviously this is a great tool for teaching metric conversions.  I honestly had never seen this concept of a staircase before and wish I had this when I was learning to convert measurements.  Give children the opportunity to visually see the increase and decrease of numbers by simply moving the magnet up and down the staircase.

What a fun way to remember the  metric prefixes: kilo-, hecto-, deca-, deci-, centi-, and milli-, and practice multiplication and division skills in a new way!  One of my children is studying scientific notation and I thought  this tool can also be used to help grasp this concept as well.  Once children understand the steps to be powers of ten it might help the child to conceptualize this

as scientific notation - moving up or down the stairs.

Along with the board, the magnetic shoe and magnetic cat, this package also comes with an instruction booklet.  The recommended age is eight and up/grades 3 and up.  The instructions clearly display an effective way of teaching children the prefixes and using the base units of meters, liters and grams.  The back page of the instruction booklet is a reproducible puzzle “What do you call a group of 10 millipedes?”   Using the staircase, solve ten problems to find out which letter goes in the space to provide you with the answer! Lots of fun.

Please visit Educational Insights for more information on this great teaching aid.

*Disclaimer: I was given a complimentary  Magnetic Metric Staircase for the purpose of facilitating my review. No monetary compensation was given. All opinions expressed herein are unbiased and not influenced by the developing company or its affiliates in any way.*