Parents Education Night: SENSORIAL

Montessori Sensorial Exercises

PURPOSE

A young child meets the world around him through the constant use of all his senses. To examine a new object, a baby will look at it, hold it in his hands to feel the texture and weight, shake it, lick it, or even try to bite it. Since he quite naturally uses all his powers of observation during his early years, Dr. Montessori felt that this was the ideal time to give the child equipment, which would sharpen his senses and enable him to understand the many impressions he receives through them.

The Sensorial Materials in the Montessori classroom help the child to become aware of details by offering him, at first, strongly contrasted sensations, such as red and blue, and then variously graded sensations, such as many different shades of blue. The material enables him to know what is red, what is blue, and then to understand the abstraction of blueness and finally the abstraction of color itself.

East of the Sensorial Materials isolates one defining quality such as color, weight, shape, texture, size, sound, smell, etc. The equipment emphasizes this one particular quality by eliminating or minimizing other differences. Thus, the sound boxes are all the same size, same shape, smae color, and same texture; they differ only in the sounds, which are made when the child shakes them.

The importance of educating the senses can be illustrated by an example from the adult world. It is possible for men and women, as well as children, to receive any amount of sensory impressions and be none the richer. Two adults may attend a concert together. One experiences great pleasure and the other, with equally accurate hearing, feels only boredom and weariness. Sense impressions are not enough by themselves. The mind needs education and training to be able to discriminate and appreciate.

A young child can remain unmoved by a myriad of sensory impressions in her everyday environment. What she nneds is not more and more impressions bu the ability to understand what she is perceiving. The Montessori Sensorial Materials help the child to distinguish, to categorize, and to relate new information to what she already knows. Dr. Montessori believed that this process is the beginning of conscious knowledge. It is brought about by the intelligence working in a concentrated way on the impressions given by the senses.

THE PINK TOWER

Size in three dimensions is introduced to the child by the use of the Pink Tower. This is a series of ten pink cubes graded in size from one centimeter cubed to ten centimeters cubed. All the blocks are the same color, shape, and texture. To perform the exercise, the child must recognize the gradation in size and build the tower beginning with the largest cube and finally placing the smallest cube on top. The exercise is self-correcting because a block placed in the improper order will be immediately noticeable and may cause the tower to topple.

THE BROWN STAIRS

The Brown Stairs introduces the child to differences in size in two dimensions. This is a set of ten prisms with a constant length of twenty centimeters but whose width and height both vary from one centimeter to ten centimeters. Again, the child must place the blocks in proper gradation forming a stair-like structure. With this exercise the teacher introduces the concepts of thickness and thinness, using the terms thick, thicker, thickest and thi, thinner, thinnest, with the corresponding blocks as concerte examples.

THE RED RODS

The Red Rods help the child to recognize differences in size in one dimension - length. Again, the child must place the rods in the proper sequence from the smallest, which is ten centimeters in length to the largest, which is one meter in length. The exercise is similar to the preceding ones in that a mistake in the order is very evident to the child and can be corrected easily. It also offers the teacher the opportunity of introducing to the child the terms short, shorter, shortest and long, longer, longest. This equipment gives the child a sensorial basis for learning to count when he begins mathematics.

THE ART OF LISTENING

The art of listening carefully is a quality worth cultivating for a lifetime. Many youngsters in today's nosiy world have formed the habit of "turning off" their hearing. They make no effort to distinguish the many sounds that assault their ears and thus they block themselves from many learning activities.

Listening attentively is a vital preparation for reading. Montessori designed several sensorial games to help the child concentrate on particular sounds. In one game a child is blindfolded and asked to identify particular sounds in the classroom, such as the noise of opening a window, closing a door, closing a book, or pouring water. In another game, he tries to identify the voices of his classmates without looking at the students who are speaking.

THE SOUND BOXES

To help children become more aware of the intensity of sound, Montessori designed a set of six cylinder-shaped brown wooden boxes with red tops. Each box contains a small amount of a different substance such as salt, rice, or dired beans. The sounds produced when the child shakes the boxes vary in intensity from soft to loud. This set of boxes corresponds to a second set with blue tops. Each box in the first set has a mate in the second set that produces a similar sound. The child must find the pairs by listening and then grade the boxes from the loudest to the softest.

THE BELLS

Another quality of sound, which is interesting to the child, is pitch. To isolate this quality, Montessori designed a set of black and white bells corresponding to the black and white keys onthe piano. The bells are alink in every detail expect the pitch, which is heard when the child strikes them gently. A similar set of brown bells corresponds exactly in pitch to the black and white set. The exercise consists of pairing the bells and later grading them in the order of the regular scale and then the half-tone scale.

From, A Parent's Guide to the Montessori Classroom by Aline D. Wolf