Sensorial
The Sensorial learning area of the curriculum is focused on educating and refining your child’s senses. Sensorial comes from the words sense or senses. Children learn from their environment. This occurs through contact with their surroundings and with the use of their senses. The Sensorial exercises are categorised into eight groups:
- Visual – sight
- Tactile – touch
- Baric – pressure and weight
- Thermic – temperature
- Auditory – hearing
- Olfactory – smell
- Gustatory – taste
- Stereognostic – muscular memory
How does a child benefit from educating their senses?
The senses and the vocabulary that accompanies them allows your child to classify their environment and to describe it to others, to tell them what they are experiencing, or what they need. Many of the materials are graduated in groups of ten. This lays the foundation for Mathematics because the materials are organised in units of ten and are real, physical examples of the numbers they will later use.
What are the Sensorial materials like?
Dr Maria Montessori designed the sensory materials to offer young children real, physical experience in classifying and comparing their environment. The materials in the sensorial learning area are designed to help children sharpen their senses by isolating particular qualities such as colour, size, flavour, smell, pitch, texture and weight. On the Sensorial shelves there will be specially designed and hand made materials to encourage development of the senses, such as the pink tower; sets of cylinders graduated in size; fabrics to sort by touch.
