Tim Seldin & Paul Epstein Ph.D. An Education for Life

The Sensorial Exercises
What’s inside?
Children use the
Mystery Box to
help develop their
sense of touch.
A
child interacts with the
physical world through her
senses. From birth, she will
look, listen, touch, taste, pick up,
manipulate, and smell almost anything
that comes into her grasp. At
first, everything goes into the
mouth. Gradually she begins to
explore each object’s weight,
texture, and temperature. She may
watch something that catches her
attention, such as a butterfly, with
infinite patience. The sensorial curriculum
is designed to help the
child focus her attention more
carefully on the physical world,
exploring with each of her senses
the subtle variations in the properties
of objects.
At first, the child may simply be
asked to sort among a prepared
series of objects that vary by only
one aspect, such as height, length,
or width. Other exercises challenge
her to find identical pairs or focus
on very different physical properties,
such as aroma, taste, weight,
shades of color, temperature, or
sound. These exercises are essentially
puzzles, and they tend to fascinate
the children because they
are just difficult enough to represent
a meaningful challenge. Each
has a built-in control of error that
allows the child who is observant
to check her own work.
The Sensorial exercises include
lessons in vocabulary, as the children
master the names of everything
from sophisticated plane and
solid geometric figures to the parts
of familiar plants and animals.
As the Inuits demonstrate to us
with their many different words for
snow, we observe that as the children
learn the correct names for
A GUIDED TOUR OF THE MONTESSORI CLASSROOM — SENSORIAL
things, the objects themselves take
on meaning and reality as the child
learns to recognize and name
them.
Why is it so important to educate
the young child’s senses?
We certainly don’t believe that we
can improve a child’s hearing or
sight through training. However,
we can help children to pay attention,
to focus their awareness,
and to learn how to observe and
consider what comes into their
experience. In a way, the Sensorial
curriculum accomplishes something
like a course in wine tasting
or music appreciation; one learns
to taste, smell, or hear what is experienced
with a much deeper
awareness and appreciation. These
exercises can help children understand
and appreciate their world
more fully.
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