Stair Steps Board

Note: for US Customers, please email wendy@musicescapades.com to place your order. Orders will be processed manually.

Stair Steps Board

Bring pattern-based learning to life with the Stair Steps Board—a beautifully designed, hands-on tool that gives students a clear visual for melodic direction, pitch relationships, and interval movement. This single-board version of our stair step cutouts offers eight built-in step patterns that help students intuitively grasp how notes move—up, down, or repeating—before they read or perform them.

Crafted from smooth, durable wood and sized at 11x11 inches, this board is fully compatible with our 1-inch Wooden Alphabet Tiles and Solfege Magnets, offering seamless integration with your favorite manipulatives. It’s also a wonderful match for tactile pieces like Japanese Iwako erasers, felt cutouts, or other small objects to keep lessons playful and engaging.

Product Info

• Wooden stair step board (11x11 inches)
• 8 distinct stair paths built into one solid board
• Compatible with 1-inch Wooden Alphabet Tiles and Solfege Magnets
• Works with tactile objects like erasers or tokens for interactive learning
• Hand-made item

Note: solfege and alphabet tokens/pieces on pictures not included

Creative Uses

🎵1. Pattern Exercises (Stepping & Skipping) with Alphabet Tiles
Use alphabet tiles to practice visualizing and building musical steps and skips. Students can physically place tiles into the stair grooves to show stepwise motion or intervals between notes. Ask them to build a “stepping melody” or a “skipping melody,” then sing it, clap it, or find it on the keyboard. This concrete model helps early learners connect the abstract idea of pitch distance with something they can see and touch.

🎹 2. Build Major and Minor Penta Scales
Guide students through constructing pentascales by placing alphabet tiles into the board in ascending order. You can start with C-D-E-F-G for a C major pentascale or adjust patterns to build minor forms. 

📚 3. Complements the Music For Young Children (MYC) Program (Pattern Reading & Exercises)
If you're teaching within the Music for Young Children (MYC) framework, this board is a natural fit. MYC places a strong emphasis on pattern reading, directional movement, and interval recognition—skills this board is built to support. Use it to reinforce MYC concepts like “stepping up” or “jump up high” while giving students a fun, sensory way to explore patterns before transferring them to the staff or keyboard.

🎤 4. Solfege Magnets for Sight Singing Activities
Pair the board with Solfege Magnets to visually map out Do-Re-Mi patterns. Students can place the magnets into the stair shapes to build melodic sequences and sing them aloud using solfege syllables. This tool works well for call-and-response games, echo singing, and sight-singing warmups. You can even build a “mystery melody” and ask students to decode and sing it.

🧠 5. Interval Discovery with Japanese Iwako Erasers or Tactile Objects
Turn the board into a fun and interactive interval lab by using small tokens, erasers, or 1-inch shaped objects. Have students place two objects on a stair path and identify whether the notes move by a second, third, fourth, etc. You can quiz them, let them build their own, or create matching games to reinforce interval names and sounds. This kind of tactile, self-led activity is perfect for centers or lesson warm-ups.

Whether you're focusing on early melodic concepts, preparing students for staff reading, or expanding pattern awareness, the Stair Steps Board makes abstract ideas tangible. It’s simple enough for beginners and flexible enough to grow with your students—supporting everything from scale work to solfege, MYC, and interval training.

It’s one of those tools that feels easy to use—but ends up being a game-changer in how students see and understand music.