Montessori: Sensorial

The Montessori curriculum is broken down into four main areas: practical life, sensorial, math and language.

The sensorial area holds some of the most classic Montessori materials, including the infamous pink tower. The sensorial curriculum is designed to refine the child’s senses and help them organize all the information they are taking in through the period of the absorbent mind. These materials aid the child in sorting the impressions they have gathered from their environment. Activities in the sensorial area support the refinement of all five senses—taste, touch, smell, hearing and vision. Just like practical life, each activity has a direct and indirect aim. The direct aim is supporting the sense being refine. For example, the direct aim of the pink tower is visual discrimination. The indirect aim is the development of order, coordination, independence and concentration. The purpose of the sensorial curriculum is to support the child’s construction of a logical and orderly internal cognitive system. The sensorial materials are designed to help children develop skills to observe, compare, problem solve and appreciate the world around them.

Control of error is an important element in the Montessori materials. The control of errors gives the child an obvious indication that that an error has been made without the need for adult correction. A classic example of control of error in a sensorial materials would be the insets and frames in the geometry cabinet. If a child places a shape in the incorrect frame, it will not fit. Another example would be the control of error in the pink tower. If the cubes are not graded from largest to smallest, it will be visually incorrect or even fall over.

Isolation of a single quality if another fundamental characteristic of sensorial materials. Dr. Montessori discussed this idea of isolating a single quality. She believed it would help bring order and clarity into the mind of the child. Each of these materials is designed to educate the visual, acoustic, tactile, olfactory and gustatory senses. There are also specific materials designed to support the development of other sensations, including thermic, baric, kinesthetic and stereognostic senses.

The sensorial materials are designed to meet the needs of a child during their various sensitive periods. (You can read more about sensitive periods here.) Three to six year old children have a strong interest in movement and want, as Dr. Montessori described, to become “masters of their actions.” The sensorial materials were designed to meet the child’s need for activity. These materials meet this need by not only being visually appealing, but by offering opportunities for movement with each material. When the child has the opportunity to exercise his need for movement while mastering his environment, she is “continuously busy, happy, always doing something with his hands.”