Sensorial

Sensorial uses activities and lessons to help children develop their five senses: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. These activities help children understand, classify, and clarify the world around them by noticing details like color, shape, smell, sound, temperature, weight, and texture. Some examples of sensorial activities in Montessori include: Exploring a fruit and vegetable basket, collecting natural objects, spending time outside in nature, playing with water, working with playdough or clay, smelling bottles, playing sound games.

Montessori also uses specialized materials to help children learn to build, sort, and sequence, which can prepare them for later math, language, and scientific exploration. Some examples of these materials include:

  • The Pink Tower - This set of ten pink cubes of different sizes helps children develop spatial awareness, visual discrimination, and fine motor skills. Children learn to differentiate sizes, order objects by dimension, and refine their hand-eye coordination.

  • Knobbed Cylinder- blocks that engage a child's sense of vision and touch, and help them develop visual discrimination of size and perception of dimension. They can also prepare children for math activities like comparison, grading, and seriation.

Mathematics

In a Montessori classroom, Math is a hands-on, tactile learning process that uses materials to help children develop math concepts. Materials are usually made of wood and painted in pleasant colors, and are ordered from simpler to more complex. Montessori math activities are presented in order, and children are encouraged to work at their own pace. Materials invite children to have a trial-error approach, children operate the materials by hand, they help children evolve progressively, and the materials are fun and educational. Montessori math is designed to help children develop a deep understanding of mathematical concepts and real-world skills. 

  • Some examples of Montessori math materials include:

    • Sandpaper numbers - Introduce children to the numerals 0 to 9 and teach them the symbols that represent each number's quantity

    • Number rods - Help children learn the names of numbers and their sequence, and to associate spoken numbers with their quantity

    • Golden beads - Children can use golden beads to build numbers into the thousands. For example, a single bead represents 1, 10 beads strung together in a line represent 10, and 100 beads in a flat square represent 100.