Our Sensorial shelves include many of the materials that Montessori is best known for: the pink tower, the brown stairs, the knobbed and knobless cylinders and the varieties of insets. Maria Montessori herself designed most of these works, based on her own experiences of how young children learn.
If you’ve ever seen a two-year-old work her way around a room and pick up nearly every item within reach, then you know the appeal of these materials to the young child. These are items that are attractive for the child to look at, that they can pick up and manipulate–and learn. Sensorial activities help children develop by encouraging their brain to differentiate between similar objects. Such visual discrimination will soon help children when they begin writing and reading (visualize the difference between “r”, “n” and “h”). Working with patterns develops the neural pathways to facilitate understanding quantities and other math processes.
