Development and Education of the Senses: Ages Three to Six

Young children use their senses to explore their environment. Through sensory exploration, they receive a myriad of sensory impressions from birth.

From about the age of three, the developing human mind, together with the sensitive period of order, naturally strives to discriminate similarities and differences resulting in young children sorting, arranging and classifying the many sensory experiences they have collected so far.

The inventory of sensory experience they construct at this age becomes a resource they use both for thinking and creating.

The Montessori materials children use to fine-tune sensory perception and discrimination, the sensorial materials, are some of the most distinctive and iconic of all the Montessori materials. The sensorial materials are sets of definitive or graded objects designed to precise specifications. Each set isolates one sensory quality only in regular and measurable ways. The qualities isolated by the Montessori sensorial materials include: texture, colour, shape, dimension, mass, taste, smell, temperature, pitch and intensity of sound. Children are taught a precise vocabulary to talk about the sensory qualities, and their variations, embodied in the materials. They learn these words in contrasting sets, for example, red/blue/yellow; loud/soft; long/short; rough/smooth; triangle/square/circle; cube/sphere. In addition, children are introduced to the superlative and comparative language for example longer/shorter, longest/shortest. This vocabulary then becomes a resource children can use to make more precise meanings about their world. Children use the sensorial materials in the exercises of the senses.

The exercises of the senses provide children with keys to exploring the world, as well as a means to refine perception and to construct a foundation for abstract thinking and creative expression. Initially, the exercises provide children with opportunities to use each sense to distinguish contrasting perceptions. Later, the children use the exercises to discriminate between increasingly fine variations in order to grade the objects in each set.

The Montessori exercises of the senses support and develop skills and dispositions such as exploration, observation, order, questioning and speculation. These exercises prepare for learning in school subject areas, including mathematics, language, science and geography. For example, exercises of the senses can be used as a foundation for the following Years F-2 Curriculum described in the Shape of the Australian Curriculum: Science (Commonwealth of Australia 2009: 7).

Curriculum focus: awareness of self and the local world

Young children have an intrinsic curiosity about their immediate world and a desire to explore and investigate things around them. Asking questions leads to speculation and the testing of ideas. Exploratory, purposeful play is a central feature of their investigations. Observation, using the senses in dynamic ways, is an important skill to be developed in these years. Observation leads into the idea of order that involves describing, comparing and sorting.

The exercises of the senses include exercises through which children learn to attend to their perceptions and to discriminate between finer and finer variation using the following senses:

• visual (dimension, colour, shape)

• tactile (texture, mass, temperature, stereognostic)

• auditory (pitch, timbre, rhythm, style, intensity of sound)

• olfactory (smell)

• gustatory (taste)

The exercises of the senses help children order sensory impressions in a mental inventory, or classification system, accompanied by a precise vocabulary, which they can use as a resource for thinking and creative expression. These exercises complement children’s work with puzzles and construction materials. It culminates in the children’s ability to apply the skills they gain in sensory discrimination and judgement to phenomena in the wider environment. The use of the sensorial materials also develops children’s skill with the precise use of the hand in increasingly exact and controlled movement.

Jumpt to section:

1.SS.010 Visual discrimination: dimension

1.SS.020 Visual discrimination: colour

1.SS.030 Visual discrimination: shape (form)

1.SS.040 Visual discrimination: mixed

1.SS.050 Tactile discrimination: texture

1.SS.060 Tactile discrimination: mass (baric sense)

1.SS.070 Tactile discrimination: temperature (thermic sense)

1.SS.080 Tactile discrimination: stereognostic

1.SS.090 Auditory discrimination: dynamics/intensity of sound

1.SS.100 Auditory discrimination: pitch

1.SS.110 Auditory discrimination: timbre

1.SS.120 Auditory discrimination: rhythm

1.SS.130 Auditory discrimination: style

1.SS.140 Olfactory discrimination: smell

1.SS.150 Gustatory discrimination: taste