Sensorial
Sensorial materials are designed to help children learn about qualities like color, size, shape, length, texture, and sound. Three to six year olds are increasingly able to make finer and finer distinctions among the many stimuli around them. Sensorial activities assist children in refining their discriminations, putting them on the road to becoming good observers of the world. Sensorial materials in the Primary classroom include Knobbed Cylinders, for practice with dimension; Color Tables; Rough and Smooth Boards; Geometric Solids; the Pink Tower; and the Binomial Cube.
Our students work with materials specifically designed to refine their senses of color, weight, shape, texture, size, sound, smell, and taste. Each of the sensory materials affords one or more specific projects. The child does not experience size, texture or color for its own sake, but as a means for accomplishing a task, either one that a teacher has illustrated or one the child innovates. In either case, the child learns the pragmatic value of sensorial awareness and the converse, that what we find fascinating aesthetically and physically has an inner logic that we are in the process of discovering. The child implicitly appreciates that the various senses are powerful resources for solving puzzles, accomplishing projects, achieving ambitions which the materials themselves select, as if they have an inner secret that the child discovers.
The child's mind is tuned and sophisticated through the manipulation of Montessori sensorial materials. Our materials are designed both aesthetically and with a scientific precision aimed at suggesting to the child particular paths toward development. We believe that the child's work with sensorial material is the beginning of conscious knowledge, albeit not through language or reflective thought per se. Instead, conscious knowledge is evoked indirectly, though the intelligence that is evoked when working in a concentrated way on the impressions given by the senses. However intelligent a child may be before working with materials, his or her interaction with them produces intelligence.
