Montessori Math Activities

What is Sensorial Work

Sensorial comes from the words sense or senses. Dr. Maria Montessori introduced a subject called „Sensorial‟ where the materials are specially designed to enable the children to use their senses to explore different attributes of the world. All the sensorial materials involve followings:
1. Shape
2. Color
3.Texture
4.Sound
5. Smell
6. Taste
7.Temperature
8.Weight and
9.Size.

The Purpose of Sensorial activities

Montessori believed that sensorial experiences began at birth. Through his senses, the child studies his environment. Through this study, the child then begins to understand his environment.
Through work with the sensorial materials, the child is given the keys to classifying the things around him, which leads to the child making his own experiences in his environment

Sensorial Exercise Groups

Sensorial Exercises were designed by Montessori to cover every quality that can be perceived by the senses such as size, shape, composition, texture, loudness or softness, matching, weight, temperature, etc. Because the Exercises cover such a wide range of senses, Montessori categorized the Exercises into eight different groups:
Visual : able to be seen by the eye
Tactile :the sense of touch or contact
Baric : sense to the weight or pressure Thermic: caused by heat or temperature
Auditory: to the sense of hearing
Olfactory: The sense of smell.
Gustatory: the sensation that results when taste buds in the tongue and throat
Stereognostic: TheStereognostic sense allows the child to discriminate size and shape through the use of touch.

In the Visual Sense Exercises, the child learns how to visually discriminate differences between similar objects and differing objects.
In the Tactile Sense Exercises, the child learns through his sense of touch. “Although the sense of touch is spread throughout the surface of the body, the Exercises given to the children are limited to the tips of the fingers, and particularly, to those of the right hand
In the Baric sense Exercises, the child learns to feel the difference of pressure or weight of different objects. This sense is heightened through the use of a blindfold or of closing your eyes.
In the Thermic Sense Exercises, the child works to refine his sense of temperature.
In the Auditory Sense Exercises, the child discriminates between different sounds. In doing these different Exercises, the child will refine and make him more sensitive to the sounds in his environment.
In the Olfactory and Gustatory Sense Exercises, the child is given a key to his smelling and tasting sense. Although not all smells or tastes are given to the child in these Exercises, the child does work to distinguish one smell from another or one taste from another. He can then take these senses, and apply them to other smells or tastes in his environment.
In the Stereognostic Sense Exercises, the child learns to feel objects and make recognitions based on what he feels. “When the hand and arm are moved about an object, an impression of movement is added to that touch. Such an impression is attributed to a special, sixth sense, which is called a muscular sense, and which permits many impressions to be stored in a “muscular memory”, which recalls movements that have been made