A young child meets the world around her through the constant use of all her senses. To examine a new object, a baby will look at it, hold it in her hands to feel the texture and weight, shake it, lick it, or even try to bite it. Dr. Montessori felt that since the child quite naturally uses all her powers of observation during her early years, this was the ideal time to give her equipment that sharpens her senses and enables her to understand the many impressions she receives through it.
The Sensorial Materials in the Montessori classroom help the child to become aware of details by offering her at first, strongly contrasted sensations, such as red and blue, and then variously graded sensations, such as the many different shades of blue. The material enables her to know what is red, what is blue, and then to understand the abstraction of blueness and finally the abstraction of color itself.
Each 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 Color Tablets are all the same size, the same shape, and the same texture. They differ only in color.
The important 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 needs is not more and more impressions bur 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, a 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 introduce 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 thin, thinner, thinnest, with the corresponding blocks as concrete 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 shortest, which is ten centimeters in length, to the longest, 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 she begins mathematics.
THE SMELLING JARS
The smelling materials consists of two sets of small jars with removable caps. These jars are identical in all respects except the flavoring that they contain. One has cinnamon, another mint, another coffee, another cloves, etc. Each jar has a significant fragrance.
The food is covered by cheesecloth or a perforated top so that the child can smell it, but she can't see or feel it. Each jar in the first set has a mate in the second set. The child combines the pairs by carefully smelling each jar. The teacher uses the exercise as an opportunity to build the child's vocabulary by teaching her the names of the foods she is smelling.
In a parallel exercise, children smell cotton dampened with drops of liquids such as perfume, vanilla and vinegar. Many teachers follow up this exercise by having the children carefully smell flowers in the school garden. Some children, wearing a blindfold, learn to identify many of the flowers by their fragrance.
THE COLOR TABLETS
The child's first exercise with color is a box containing six tablets-two red, two blue and two yellow. All the tablets are the same size, shape and texture. They differ only in highly contrasting color. In this exercise, the child pairs the tablets and learns the corresponding names. This is a simple exercise used for the very youngest children in the class.
The difficulty of the exercise can be increased by gradually adding more pairs of colors. Eventually, the child should be able to match and name eleven different pairs.
GRADING THE COLORS
For the next step the child may use a box containing eight different shades of eight different colors. The shades of each color are graded from very light to very dark. To perform this exercise, the child must distinguish the intensity of the shades and place the tablets in order from the lightest to the darkest shade of each color. When the exercise is completed, the arrangement gives a pretty rainbow effect that is appealing to the children.
This activity can be made more challenging by the teacher. She can select a color tablet and ask the child to go to the box and bring back the one that is just darker or just lighter than then one the teacher is holding. To do this is not easy, but many children are able to do it accurately after having worked with the colors for several months. Teaching children to be aware of fine differences in color is giving them remote preparation for all kinds of scientific observations, art, art appreciation, decorating, and many other meaningful activities.
THE BARIC TABLETS
Another sensorial material is a box containing three sets of little blocks of wood, each set varying slightly from the other two in weight. The blocks also differ in color so the child wears a blindfold while doing the exercise. This eliminates the visual difference and enables the child to sort the blocks by weighing them on the tips of his fingers. First the child mixes two sets together and attempts to sort them into two piles corresponding to the terms light and heavy. Later he increases the difficulty by adding a third set and sorting them into light, medium, and heavy. The child can correct the exercise himself by removing the blindfold and nothing whether or not all the blocks in each pile are the same color.
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