Discipline : Sensorial

The Sensorial Area of the environment is the entrance into the world of the abstract.  The notion of sound or size is merely just a concept yet it is through the senses that one understands and classifies one’s surroundings.  In order to understand our world we attach labels to it, labels such as thickness or redness brings to us awareness and comprehension of what it is that we are experiencing.  Dr. Maria Montessori understood this and devised the Sensorial Materials, allowing the child to work with his own process of sensory perception.  The maturation of the senses is instrumental in allowing the child to organize and reorganize his own intelligence.  The child of the first plane is the ‘sensorial explorer’ because sensory perception is at the highest peak of a human being’s life.  The Sensorial Materials achieve the work of sensory perception by isolating one concept at a time.  In order to know the bigness of an object we must have another object of which to compare it to, for instance two cubes of the same color and made of the same matter but not the same size.   

The work on the senses revolves around but is not limited to:​

1. Visual (sight)

2. Gustatory (taste)

3. Tactile (touch)

4.  Olfactory (smell)

5. Auditory (hearing)

6. Baric (sense of weight)

7. Thermic (sense of temperature or heat)

8. Kinesthetic (muscular sense)

9. Stereognostic (knowledge of form)