Educating the Whole Child: Sensorial Work
The sensorial material is most deeply explored in the primary class, where the children are passing through sensitive periods related to perception of form, texture, color, weight, sound, smell, taste, temperature: the ways in which we take in information about the world. The materials are not intended to give new impressions, but to order, classify, relate, explore and realize the sense impressions the child has already formed. Each piece of material isolates a single quality: for example, the pink tower shows only variations in dimension. The control of error is visual disharmony—the child can see that the cubes are not placed in order.
The sensorial materials serve as keys to other areas of learning. Size discrimination is refined through the use of materials to demonstrate length, width, volume and weight; these materials, designed on the base-10 system, lead directly to mathematical awareness. The sound exercises lead into music and composition. Texture is utilized in learning the shapes and sounds of the alphabet. Discrimination of forms extends into geometry, botany, geography, and so on. The language of the material is usually given after the child has explored it: triangle, trapezoid,and square, corolla, calyx, and stem, North America, Asia, and Africa, . . . .the words crystallize the concepts for the child.
