Montessori sensorial materials

Montessori sensorial materials are materials used in the Montessori classroom to help a child develop and refine his or her five senses. Use of these materials constitutes the next level of difficulty after those of practical life.

Like many other materials in the Montessori classroom, sensorial materials have what is called "control of error", meaning that the child not only works with the material, but has a way to check their work rather than seeking out the teacher if they have a question on whether or not they did it right. This is done to help promote independence and problem solving on the part of the child.

Small, tall and short, thick and thin, and combinations of these.

The cylinder blocks are ten wooden cylinders of various dimensions that can be removed from a fitted container block using a knobbed handle. To remove the cylinders, the child tends to naturally use the same three-finger grip used to hold pencils.

Several activities can be done with the cylinder blocks. The main activity involves removing the cylinders from the block and replacing them again in the spot that one got them from. The control of error is constituted in the child's inability to replace a cylinder in the wrong hole.

The pink tower has ten pink cubes of different sizes, from 1 centimeter up to 10 cm in increments of 1 cm. The work is designed to provide the child with a concept of "big" and "small."

The child starts with the largest cube and puts the second-largest cube on top of it. This continues until all ten cubes are stacked on top of each other.

The control of error is visual. The child sees the cubes are in the wrong order and knows that they should fix them. The successive dimensions of each cube are such that if the cubes are stacked flush with a corner, the smallest cube may be fit squarely on the ledge of each level.

The broad stair (also called Brown Stair) is designed to teach the concepts of "thick" and "thin". It comprises ten sets of wooden prisms with a natural or brown stain finish. Each stair is 20 cm in length and varies in thickness from 1 to 10 cm. When put together from thickest to thinnest, they make an even staircase.

As an extension, the broad stairs are often used with the pink tower to allow the child to make many designs.

The pink tower and the broad stair are shown here together in an extension activity. The child can make a variety of designs limited only by his or her imagination and the constraints of the material.

The red rods are rods with a square cross section, varying only in length. The smallest is 10 cm long and the largest is one meter long. Each rod is 2.5 cm/1inch square. By holding the ends of the rods with two hands, the material is designed to give the child a sense of long and short.

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