There are five main areas of the Montessori classroom: Practical Life, Sensorial, Math, Language, and Cultural Studies.
Math and language make sense, but what's "Sensorial"
all about? Let's take a deeper look at what children can learn in this
particular area of the classroom and how you can relate some of the same
principles to life outside the classroom.
All of the activities
you'll find in the Sensorial area help a child train one of their five
senses: touch, sight, smell, taste, or hearing. Anyone who has observed a
young child putting just about everything in their mouths understands
how much children learn through their senses!
Let's look at each sense individually and examine how the Sensorial materials help children explore their world.
Touch
There's an activity called the Fabric Boxes
in Sensorial that epitomizes the development of the sense of touch. The
box contains squares of fabrics of different weaves or fibers. The
child has to find the matching pair, typically with a blindfold on! By
carefully rubbing a piece of wool between two fingers, for example, then
feeling a piece of cotton, the child is honing their sense of touch
without the added distraction of sight. At home, place many different
fabrics in your child's environment. Speak about how soft or how prickly
some fabrics are, and encourage feeling a fabric between thumb and
pointer finger!
Sight
You'll often hear
teachers speak about a child developing visual discrimination, and the
Sensorial materials help to do just that. Take the Pink Tower
for example. It's a relatively simple set of building blocks, but while
building, children learn to visually discriminate the dimensions of one
block as compared to another. When built correctly, the tower ranges
from the largest block at 10cm cubed to the smallest, only 1cm cubed. At
home, help your child learn visual discrimination by making simple
"smaller" or "larger" comparisons.
Smell
The
olfactory sense, or sense of smell, is delightful to explore with
children. Smells are associated with memory, like fresh-baked cookies or
fall leaves, and other smells, like the smell of a skunk or bleach,
alert us to danger. In the Sensorial area, you'll find Smelling
Bottles that act much the same as the Fabric or Sound Boxes. There are
two sets of jars with cotton balls moistened with a certain scent, and
the child's job is to find the matching scent pair. At home, you can
explore scent in the kitchen by isolating spices in small dishes and
smelling them, or perhaps even setting up your own matching game. Make
observations about scents outdoors as well, "Do you smell that lilac
bush? Wow, so pungent!"
Taste
This might
seem like a difficult sense to explore in the classroom, but the
Sensorial area includes Tasting Jars with flavors like salty, sweet,
bitter and sour. Teacher and student taste the flavors by dropping a few
drops onto a clean spoon. Once again, they attempt to match flavors
from two identical sets of bottles! In most of these Sensorial
activities you'll notice that only one sense is developed at a time.
This is called "isolation of difficulty". It allows a child to practice
one new skill at a time without distraction or confusion. At home, try
isolating flavors and making a game out of tasting. For example, mix a
little lemon juice and water to taste, or salt and water, or sugar and
water! See what you like best.
Hearing
A fun activity for children that hones hearing is the Sound Boxes.
Like the Fabric Boxes, this is a matching activity. There are two sets
of tubes, some marked red and some marked blue, that contain identical
filler materials like sand or rocks. The child needs to shake one red
tube, then find the matching sound in the set of blue tubes! The small
distinction in sounds when shaken is quite hard to hear, but children
soon master this activity and delight in their ability to match the
tubes! At home, set up a similar activity using plastic easter eggs, or
even up-cycled water bottles. Make a blindfold so your child can't see
what's inside the bottles!
The Sensorial area of the classroom is
literally a feast for the senses. No matter what type of educational
setting your child is currently enrolled in, remember there are plenty
of ways you can encourage exploration of the world through the senses at
home! Get creative, and follow your child's interests.