Sensorial: Sense and Child

Sensorial comes from the words sense or senses. As there are no new experiences for the child to take from the sensorial work, the child is able to concentrate on the refinement of all his senses, from visual to stereognostic.
“The first of the child’s organs to begin functioning are his senses” (The Absorbent mind, chapter 8, page 84)
A child’s journey in life begins right from the time that he is in his mother’s womb, increasing in size and developing his physical structures. Once he is born he leaves the comfort of his mother’s womb, he must go through a period of reconstruction, to develop in movement, speech and other areas. However, the child does not possess a fixed way of behaviour or any natural way of acting or thinking and controlling in advance, like those in animals who are immediately able to walk or even run as soon as they are born. But he has patterns of mental power, unfolding. He gradually unfolds to exhibit the characteristic of his kind in movement, speech, and action, being guided by an inner guide. He is not taught by his parents to walk, talk or cry. He is not taught to sing, climb or think. According to Maria Montessori, this is the real identity of the child, the real revelation.
“It is necessary to begin the education of senses in the formative period, if we wish to perfect these sense development with the education which is to follow” (The Montessori Method, page 221)
The education of the senses can start from a child’s babyhood and should continue during the entire formative period to prepare a child for his future. It is necessary to begin the education of the senses in the child’s formative periods, if we wish to perfect this sense development with the education to be followed. Sensorial education helps develop a child’s intellect. Whether you believe intelligence is inherited or produced by environment, you can further it by education. Intelligence is built upon by experiences and thought processes. The Montessori materials for ages 2 ½ to 6 are designed to help the child’s mind develop the necessary skills for later intellectual learning.
The aim of the sensorial work is to make a child gain clear, conscious, information and to be able to analyze. Montessori believe that sensorial experiences began at birth while the sense organ are active from birth and the birth is at once sensible to light, sound and contacts, it has little power of movement. A child will learn to walk properly only when he is two years it is the same with speech. They have learnt about the world by touching, tasting, smelling, seeing and hearing. Through his senses, the child studies his environment. Through this study, the child then begins to understand his environment. The sensitive relations between the child and his environment lies the key to the mysterious recess in which a new born achieves the miracle of growth.
Dr. Maria Montessori discovered six sensitive period in a child’s life. She described the sensitive periods of sensorial as the blocks of time in a child’s life. The sensitive periods are sensitivity to order, learning through five senses and sensitivity to small objects, sensitivity to co-ordination of movement, sensitivity to language, and sensitivity to social aspect of life. Out of all these six sensitive periods Dr. Montessori realized that the child learns through his five sense and he has his sensitive periods. The sensorial education should be given to the child at the right time.
The importance of the sensorial area in a Montessori classroom is allowing the child to discriminate order and grading of the environment and it just prepares them for the language and math areas of the classroom.
Usually the pink tower is introduced at age 3. After the child has successfully done the tower he had learned several things: difference in sizes and weight, how to hold his or her fingers with the small cubes, how to grasp the largest cube, controlling arms and fingers so that tower doesn’t fall, and has the good feeling of completing the task. Muscular skills, intellectual and character development combine as a whole for the child when using Montessori sensorial education.
More activities, such as the broad stair, the long stair are introduced after the pink tower. “ A much more complicated exercise is that of the cylinders.” The red rods give the idea about length and the children are taught how to carry the shortest rod and the longest rod.
“We prepare him indirectly, leaving him free to the mysterious and divine labor of reproducing things according to his own feelings. Thus drawing comes to satisfy a need for expression, as does language; and almost every idea may seek expression in drawing.” (The advanced Montessori Method, page 308)
The sensorial materials not only provide a child the refinement of sense it also prepares a child for many other subjects which the child learns afterwards. These sensorial activities indirectly prepare a child for mathematics because in sensorial they deal with different shapes and sizes like what children do in geometry. All of these activities are with 3 dimensional objects and real that help with eye-hand coordination and provides a concept of size and shapes for later learning.
This is an excellent way of introducing geometry to a child at a very young age by presenting the geometry cabinet, geometrical solids etc. This indirectly prepares a child for decimal system because the material are mostly ten in number. Sensorial training is important in learning the basics of arithmetic. Montessori has a variety of materials for this purpose such as the cabinet of geometrical figure, geometrical solids etc. Likewise in other exercises children learn about sizes (big, small) colours (to grade colours) to feel textures. Pairing. They even learn about different temperatures (hot, warm, lukewarm, cool, cold) the sense of smell (lavender, sage, coffee, rose, etc) the sense of taste (bitter, sour, sweet, salt) about sense of hearing (grading softest to loudest or loudest to softest) and the bells teach the notion of musical pitch.
Sensorial materials also prepares a child for different aspects of languages like adjectives, opposites and also new words by the three period lesson, name lesson given on each material. In every presentation a child thinks logically or compares the material with other to achieve the final goal. It actually improves a child to sharpen his comparative study skills and his logical thinking. The young child is able to learn the names of the numbers by doing repeated work with the exercises, sand paper numbers, rods etc, before grasping the conceptions.
“They are very proud of seeing without their eyes.”(Montessori method, page 179 & 190)
For the education of senses in general such as touch tablets, touch fabrics, baric tablets, thermic tablets and thermic bottles the children are blindfolded. The blindfold greatly increases their interest without making the exercise into noisy fun. When a child is doing these exercise he should feel it from his tips of the finger and he should be taught how to touch the surfaces by taking the finger of the child and to draw it very lightly on the surface. Another particular of this technique is to teach the child to hold his eyes closed while he touches, encouraging him to do this by telling him that he will be able to feel the differences better, and so leading him to differentiate without the help of sight.
Sensorial apparatus provides a particular purpose and focus. It includes using the child’s hands, senses, and spontaneous activity. When a young child sees something new and exciting, he will want to touch the object. Young children will grab a new kitten and hold it immediately, they want to feel the reality of the object.
This education is not an exercise to sharpen the senses, but to allow a child to use his senses to understand what he sees. The first lesson present contrasted sensory materials and then graded materials. This teaches concepts of comparing and contrasting. For example, the first colours introduced are the primary colours, which are the most distinct on the colour chart. Red, blue and yellow are introduced, then shades and combinations are later introduced to grade by shades. “This is the beginning of the development of the intellect and it is brought about by the intelligence working in a concentrated way on the impressions given by the senses.
Sensorial impressions of child’s environment are not the same as sensorial education. Impressions are fellings and not an intellectual building block. The human mind needs information to discriminate and appreciate its culture, art, music, poetry, reading and all aspects of the environment. Early sensorial educational material was provided by Dr. Montessori for this purpose.
Education is used to tap the young child’s mind of absorbed information from the first 3 years of life. The imformation at this point is a sea of impressions in the unconscious mind. As a child works further the young mind becomes aware of concepts of size, colour, weight,quantity and so on. When the differences are clear, the names are introduced to describe these concepts. Montessori builds on concepts upon concept. Nothing is left to chance learning. There is an order and sequence to the materials presented. Montessori’s sensorial approach helps a child categorize and use his vast amount of subconscious knowledge in his or her surroundings. It is a key that unlocks the door of the mind.
Montessori understood that this intellectual activity was a manual, active approach. It came from observing her own students and is contrary to adult methods of teaching and learning. Montessori at this stage did not use picture for teaching sensorial concepts, she believed that children wanted to see and feel the real objects. The child who has worked with the sensorial materials has not only achieved a greater skill in use of senses but also gets to know more about the outside world.
“The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six. For that is the time when man’s intelligence himself, his greatest implement is being formed… At no other age has the child greater need of intelligent help, and any obstacle that impedes his creative work will lessen the chance he has of achieving perfection.”(The Absorbent Mind)
A classroom is called a prepared environment and a first effort a teacher should do is to set up her classroom. In the age of 3 to 6 a child is being introduced to the world. So Dr. Maria Montessori believes strongly in providing an environment rich in areas of learning so that the child can choose, from his own concept, what he is ready to learn. Beauty, order and accessibility are the three things which should be considered in a classroom. The main principles of the prepared environment are prder and choice, freedom, mixed age range, movement, control of error, materials and the role of the adult.
A child likes to live in an orderly environment because it gives the sense of comfort and capability. Order is for him a need of life and if this order is upset it disturbs him to the point of illness. So it is necessary to the child to have order in his environment. The sensitive period of order is of great practical importance in running of a Montessori school. The tiny children in a classroom quickly get a sort of mental image of the position of the thing in a classroom and they are delighted in seeing that the things are returned to its proper place.
When preparing the classroom environment, materials should be carefully desighned to suit the child because the material are the heart of the classroom. The materials should be designed to attract the interest of a child, the material have to be colourful, brightness and harmony of form while at the same time teaching an important concept. The purpose of each material is to give a certain concept the child is bound to discover.
Sensory play is very important in brain development. It stimilatesthe senses and sends signals to the child brain that helps to strengthen the nervous system which is important for all types of learning. For example, as children explore sensory materials they develop their sense of touch, which lays the foundation of learning other skills, such as identifying objects by touch and using fine motor muscles. The materials that the children work with may be warm or cool, wet or dry, rough or smooth, hard or soft, textured or slimy. By this children learn how to sort out and differentiate materials.
The Montessori believed that “what the hands does, the mind remembers” because the hand and mind works together. In a Montessori all materials are simple. Direct and easy to understand. Children use sensorial materials in spontaneous exercises and the children tend to act spontaneously as well. The sensorial exercises help the child in his great task of creating himself. Rather than observing an exercise a child learns more about it through experience of doing the exercise. The child becomes more active and also enjoys while doing these activities.
Concentration is a by product of a child learning with his or her hands. During the ages 3 to 6 the “hands are the biggest of all.” The equipment provides an intellectual education that will help a child eventually acquire his or her culture.
There are five basic sensors in sensorialsuch as,
1. Visual: Most adults are primarily visual learners. They need to see things demonstrated. Montessori categorized even further. She broke the visual sense into separate sections. They are dimension (size of the object), colour/chromatic (awareness of colour) and form (awareness of shape).
2. Auditory: as adults we are bombarded by sound. We tune out many sounds to function. Therefore, there are some sounds that we do noe even hear. The young child has a set of gigantic ears. He hears everything. Children in the early age are very sensitive to tones, therefore it is a good time for them to learn music.
3. Tactile: Children learn from touching. According to Dr. Montessori, tactile sense can be divided into four areas: surface touch, stereognostic (whole form, volume), thermic (temperature), and baric (differences in weights).
4. Olfactory: Children learn through their sense of smell to make a connection between eating and smelling. They use this ability to understand their environment.
5. Gustatory: A young child’s has taste buds in his entire mouth. At age sixty, we have very little left. Location of taste bud: tip of tongue (sweet taste) side of tongue (sour and salty taste) and back of tongue (bitter taste).
A child using his tactile and visual sense examine different dimension of an object (height, diameter, etc…) In a child’s exercises like cylinder blocks, pink tower, brown stairs, red rods, knobbles cylinders.
One of the main purpose of the sensorial materials is to help the child’s mind to focus on some particular quality. Dr. Maria Montessori has been able to do this by making use of the principles of the “isolation of stimulus”. For an example the red rods are same in colour, same breadth, same width made of the same kind of wood but varies only in length. So that, the child’s mind becomes psychically blind to the quality except and length in the rods. Similarly all the colour tablets are made to the same size, same weight, same shape but differs only in quality to colour. So this quality becomes the centre of attention to the child, and guides the child to use the materials in a proper manner.
The mind needs education and training to be able to discriminate and appreciate by using of sensorial materials it begins the conscious knowledge because it makes the child concentrate while working with materials on the impressions given by the sense. When using sensorial materials a child will be able to correct himself because they are allowed to work independently. They develop muscular movements which is the foundation for writing skills.the sensorial material provides a kind of guide to observation the apparatus for educating the sense offers the child the key to guide his exploration of the world.
Montessori sensorial activities introduces the child to a structured comprehension of the world in a different way. The activity enlargement of sensorial sensitivity increase the child’s respect and awareness for the things, which are the source of those sense impressions. Rather than leave the child feeling that the object is easily defined and handled, the sensorial activities make the child aware of the endless ways available for exploring the objects in its infinite depth and fullness.