Sensorial Superpowers

Young children are in a powerful process of creating an understanding of their world and where they fit in. To do this, they rely upon their senses as an interface to the world. Everything that comes into young children’s minds comes through their senses.

During the first few years of life, children absorb sensory input without discrimination. Then, around age two-and-a-half to age three, children begin to bring images from their subconscious into their consciousness. They begin to work with these images and in the process, embark on an important journey of building their intelligence.

The Sensorial Materials

To support this development, Montessori programs offer carefully designed sensorial materials. The materials isolate each sensorial quality and offer children what Dr. Maria Montessori called the “keys to the world.” In addition, the sensorial materials support children’s classification of impressions and lead to precise levels of conscious discrimination. Children who have these experiences in the formative period of brain development establish a foundation for a lifetime of order, precision, and logical, reasoned thinking.

How do sensorial materials accomplish all of this? Well, they have some significant purposes!

Sensorial materials support children’s classification and categorization of sensorial impressions. For young children, the first three years are like collecting impressions and throwing them into a closet. The images or concepts are a bit of a hodge-podge jumble. Thus, going in and accessing what is needed from this unorganized collection can be a challenge. Because this warehouse of impressions doesn’t have order or classification, children need to develop mental organization, so their collection of impressions becomes useful.

The sensorial materials help children classify and categorize all impressions they have absorbed and unconsciously stored since birth. When children interact with the sensorial materials, images emerge from their unconscious memory and into their working memory. As children use the materials, these impressions become part of their conscious memory. When children are accurate in distinguishing sensorial differences, we give language for the images, which helps the concepts become fixed in children’s minds.

Children aren’t born with organized brains with predetermined categories, so this neural organization must be built up through experience.

It’s important to understand that sensorial exercises don’t make children’s ears hear better, eyes see better, or tongue taste better. Instead, the materials help children develop powers of discrimination to analyze smaller and smaller degrees of difference.

When we take in sensorial input, everything goes into our brains. Then the brain has to make discriminations, a skill that develops through experience and the process of making finer and finer discernments. The materials offer children a clear means to classify and increase their perceptive powers, which are important mental abilities.

Sensorial materials support children in the development of abstractions.

What do we mean by abstractions? An example of an abstraction is the notion of “red.” Red as a quality does not exist in nature. Red can be represented in physical things, but we cannot bring “red” to a person. Red is a quality. It is an abstraction.

Children may already have some abstractions, but when they are young, the number is limited because they haven’t had sufficient experience to develop the abstraction. Furthermore, children don’t typically get to experience sensorial qualities in isolation. The Montessori sensorial materials isolate each quality and give children the opportunity to have enough experience to develop abstractions.

Because we, as adults, have a lot of experience in the world, it can be challenging for us to understand what children need to create abstractions. For example, to better understand the significance of abstractions, imagine being told about a quince. If you haven’t had a quince before, it is hard to pull up the image in your mind, much less what it tastes like. However, if you hear a description that a quince is a fruit, you can pull up an idea of what a fruit is. Then if you hear that a quince is in the same family as an apple and pear, you can pull up an image that brings you closer to imagining the fruit and perhaps even the type of skin it has.

But without these experiences and the organization of images, children can’t pull up the same level of abstraction. Imagination helps us, as adults, to do this: pull up images in our minds of something we haven’t experienced before based on abstractions. To imagine, we must have abstractions. This area is most related to the development of intelligence.

Sensorial materials support children’s development of accurate and discriminating recall of perceptions. The materials engage children’s memory, help them access information from their memory, and support them in using their intelligence. Memory is a tool of the intelligence, but because children aren’t born with memory, they need support with developing it. While children have an unconscious memory, they must take the impressions they have absorbed and build memory from them. The sensorial materials help this process.

Memory needs practice and experience to become stronger; it is only increased through activity. We want children’s memory to be strong, and thus we provide lots of experience with the materials and variations with the materials. With each sensorial material, there are many ways to extend the activity and help children with recall.

One significant strategy is giving language to each perception. The language is based on what is isolated in the materials–thick/thin, large/small, long/short, right-angled isosceles triangle/right-angled scale triangle, rough/smooth, heavy/light, ovoid/ellipsoid, bitter/sweet. The vocabulary is extensive and rich and ultimately fixes the perception in children’s memory.

The second strategy we use is playing games that challenge children to hold the perception in mind for longer and longer periods. For example, they might put each of the pink tower cubes scattered about the room so that in rebuilding the tower of cubes from largest to smallest, they have to remember the size of the previous piece in searching for the next largest cube. Some sensorial games also help children notice particular qualities in the environment rather than just in the materials. One favorite is searching for items in the classroom that have exactly the same shade as each of the color tablets. 

Through repeated experience with the sensorial materials, children develop clearer and more accurate perceptions and create reference points that they can use throughout life. Dr. Montessori talks about the possibility for children to develop touchstones, a fixed, accurate reference by which this quality can be accessed. These points of reference can provide a lifetime tendency for order, precision, and recall, for example, hearing the note of G without any other reference or being able to look at a pane of glass and know if it will fit into the window frame.

Sensorial materials help children develop life-long tendencies towards order and precision. We don’t know what touchstones might develop for each child, but Dr. Montessori says that touchstones developed during these early years will remain with children throughout their lives. If children can get accurate discriminations while in this time of sensitivity to sensorial input, this precision will remain with them into adulthood. Of course, children’s unique interests will also lead them to their own level of proficiency.

Functionally, this tendency toward order and precision will be important as children move into more academic work in language and math. They will be able to access powers of discrimination that will aid them in future endeavors.

Sensorial materials also provide indirect preparation for further study.

This indirect preparation means that we are taking advantage of children’s spontaneous interest and activity and thus planting the seeds for other areas that children will explore as they age. When we introduce shapes–from a decagon to an ellipse to a quatrefoil–through the geometry cabinet, children visually discriminate the shapes while also tactilely experiencing the shapes by tracing around them. Multisensory input is stronger than input through just one sense. Tracing the shape also helps to prepare children’s hands for writing. This is how the sensorial materials provide indirect preparation for further academic study.

Dr. Montessori talks about the sensorial area as being most strongly related to the development of intelligence. Working with sensorial materials requires a very different engagement from the practical life work of washing hands or scrubbing a table. Practical life activities help children coordinate movement and follow a sequence with a logical beginning, middle, and end. Sensorial materials don’t have the same kind of logical sequence. They are open-ended and exploratory. Children must consider each piece and how it works in relation to the other pieces. In working with the red rods, for example, children have to examine each rod’s length in relation to the other rods. Thus, children have to make a reasoned distinction every time they move a piece of material. This process engages the intelligence and elevates children’s level of awareness. In addition, children have to hold the images in their minds, which helps their memory.

Having an ordered, classified mind is also the foundation for intelligence. When children struggle in more academic areas like language and math, we better consider how to support their mental order and classification. Academic work can be difficult to do when the mind isn’t prepared well. However, if children can recognize and distinguish between a trapezoid and a parallelogram, they will be more likely to be able to distinguish two other shapes like “g” and “q.”  When children have a lot of experience recognizing shapes through sensorial materials, they can recognize the shapes they encounter in letters. Sometimes we go back and explore if perhaps children recognize the shapes but don’t have a strong memory. We then use sensorial games specifically designed to help different forms of memory (auditory, visual, etc.).

The sensorial area is an essential foundation for more academic work because language and math are completely based on abstractions. Words represent concrete things, but the words themselves are abstractions. The sensorial area is critical for providing the foundation for abstract thinking.

Outcomes

Although the sensorial materials may look relatively simple, they provide so much! When children use these materials, they refine their powers of discrimination, create an ordered mind, enhance their memory and recall, categorize their impressions, and build a foundation for rational thinking and intelligence.

As children achieve these skills, they experience life with an increased level of richness, becoming aware of the lovely details of their world. With a prepared mind, children can see things in a new light and with new enthusiasm. This is perhaps one of the most delightful outcomes of children’s work with the sensorial materials: they develop a whole new appreciation of the life around them–dimensions, shapes, smells, sounds, textures, and tastes–which is what gives life value and beauty.