Montessori at Home: Sensorial

In this post, I gave an overview of the Montessori sensorial curriculum. The materials in this area refine the senses a child uses to take in everything around them.

Home should never strive to look like a classroom. You do not need the full complement of Montessori sensorial materials to offer your children rich sensorial experiences. Don’t fall into the trap of feeling like you need to re-create every sensory bin you see online. Sensory rich experiences can be woven into the regular rhythms and routines of your every day life.

• Get in the kitchen. Preparing food offers endless sensorial opportunities. There are so many textures, tastes, smells and sounds! Give everything a name. Oh, that’s crunchy! Do you want to smell the vanilla? Do you hear the snap the beans make? Use time in the kitchen to draw attention to the way things taste, smell, sound, look and feel.

• Get outside. Nature provides so many opportunities for sensory exploration and the experiences can differ depending on the day! Use opportunities outside to explore contrast. Cold, hot, wet, dry. Long sticks, short sticks. Heavy rocks, light rocks. Rough bark, soft moss.

• Make art! Art offers opportunities to explore with colors and shapes. Put beautiful art in your child’s space and draw attention to the details. Notice shapes and colors. Are there interesting textures? Don’t stop at appreciating art. Find opportunities to create. Explore shapes and colors. Provide activities with primary colors to encourage even more exploration. Experiment with different types of clay. Get your hands messy and play with finger paint.

• Get down and boogie! Expose your child to all types of music. Listen to the different sounds and talk about what you hear. Is it fast or slow? What does your body want to do when you hear it? Can you clap to it? How does it make you feel? Relaxed? Excited?

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.”

Practical Life at Home

In the last post, I gave an overview of the practical life curriculum, breaking it down into four main areas: care of self, care of environment, control of movement and food preparation. Today, I want to give some ideas for activities in each area that can be set up at home.

First let me say this: your home should never aim to look like a classroom! In fact, the opposite is true. The classroom should mirror a school whenever possible. You do not need activities set up on trays. You do not need to re-create every activity you see on Pinterest. The simpler, the better.

Care of Environment: sweep, window washing, folding (napkins and washcloths are a great place to start!), wiping counters and tables, vacuuming, polishing wood, washing dishes, loading the washing machine, unloading the dryer, weeding in the flower beds or garden, arranging flowers, dusting, moping, feeding pets, watering plants. The opportunities really are endless and can be based on routines you already have in place.

Care of Self: clipping and scrubbing fingernails, dressing, tying, lacing, buttoning, cleaning glasses, bathing, brushing teeth, brushing hair. So many activities can be added in based on specific needs!

Food Preparation: carrot peeling, banana slicing, strawberry slicing with an egg slicing, hard boiled egg peeling, cucumber peeling and slicing, cheese grating, avocado mashing, herb grinding, spreading (butter, jam, nut butters), clipping herbs. Again, endless possibilities!

Control of movement: (note: I am not a big advocate for activities on trays at home. Always observe before adding in control of movement activities at home. Do they need a specific skill in isolation? Do not feel the need to add in activities just because they are cute) Tweezing herbs, pouring water from a pitcher, stringing beads, cutting paper, using tongs, spooning, using a sponge, using clothespins, using safety pins.