What We Do: Sensorial
The Purpose of the sensorial area is to aid the child in their development of the ability to reason and use their intellect. The sensorial materials serve as a scientific guide for the child to clarify, catalogue, classify, and put in order the impressions of their environment. The goal of the sensorial activities is not simply provide the child with sensory experiences. The sensorial materials is an activity that isolates one particular senses and highlights specific qualities, thus providing the child with an opportunity to refine their understanding.
The child first explores materials with his senses, simply enjoying the movement and the feel, smell, sound, touch, or taste of it. Through continued exploration the child begins to make comparisons, notices differences and sorts and sequences the materials. The child sees new relationships and begins to develop the ability to follow logical and orderly thought processes.
The Child’s work in this area can produce amazing results:
- Expands neural pathways and aids in neurological organization
- Training and refinement of the senses and thus building the intellect
- Creates order and clarity in the child’s world
- Develops concentration, coordination, order and independence
- Develops an appreciation for beauty, attention to detail, and encourages creativity
- Can assist observing adults in early detection of defects in the function of the senses
Pink Tower
Visually appealing and engaging, the Pink Tower is a foundational material from the Sensorial Area of the Montessori classroom. The stacking cubes range from the small 1 cm and increase by 1 cm until reaching a size of 10 cm. These stacking cubes use visual discrimination, coordination and prescision. The learner will bring each cube one by one to the rug and lay them down beside each other. Then they will begin to build a tower from biggest to smallest, if an error is made the learner will be able to quickly identify the error and self-correct.
The Knobless Cylinders
The Knobless Cylinders are apart of our sensorial materials which support our learners understanding of the Base Ten system and our learners are encouraged to explore the boxes. There are 4 boxes each contain a set of cylinders varying relationships; in one box the cylinders are the same height but different widths, in another the widths are identical but height is different, another box the width decreases as the height increases, and the last box the width increases while the height decreases.