Philosophy:

Young children acquire knowledge through their senses. Doctor Montessori developed numerous unique and attractive materials to help develop and refine the five senses of the growing child. These materials provide the child with concrete hands-on learning and aid the child to acquire new information via the senses. Materials found in Sensorial often isolate one specific value such as "length" in new and exciting ways for the child to explore and discover.

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“The training and sharpening of the senses have the obvious advantage of enlarging the field of perception and of offering an ever more solid foundation for intellectual growth. The intellect builds up its store of practical ideas through contact with, and exploration of its environment. Without such concepts, the intellect would lack precision and inspiration in its abstract operations. ”  (1) Montessori, 1967, pg. 101

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Sensorial Exercises were designed by Montessori to cover every quality that can be perceived by the senses.  Children engage with materials that stimulate senses by using size, shape, composition, texture, loudness or softness, matching, weight, temperature, etc.  Montessori categorized the Exercises into five different groups: Visual, Tactile, Auditory, Olfactory, Gustatory.

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For example, the Visual sensorial materials help give the children an awareness of his/her own visual sense of sight discrimination of dimension, discrimination of colour, discrimination of shape.  Also, the sensorial curriculum supports the development of vocabulary during the sensitive period of language development, i.e. children are thought the name of the shape, colour, and order.  

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The sensorial materials are also designed as preparation for arithmetics. For example, the long rods, which comprise ten red rods varying in length in 10 cm increments from 10 cm to 1 meter,  or the number rods, where the rods are divided into alternating 10 cm sections of red and blue so that they take on numeral values 1-10.

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Sensorial Exercises

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Visual Sense

- The Cylinder Blocks

- The Pink Tower

- The Broad Stair

- The Long Rods

- The Knobless Cylinder box

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The Chromatic Sense:

- Colour Box 1,2, and 3

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The Discrimination of Shape:

- Geometric cards

- The botany cabinet

- The Geometric Cabinet

- The Geometric Solids

- The Constructive Triangle Box (A, B slide and flip)

- The Decanomial Square

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The Auditory Sense:

- The Sound Boxes

- The Bells

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The Tactile Sense:

- Rough and smooth boards

- The Touch Tablets

- The Baric Tablets

- The Fabrics 

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Temperature:

- The Thermic Tablets

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The Stereogonostic Sense: Size and Shape

- The Mystery Bag

- The progressive Exercises

- Geometric Solids

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The Olfactory Sense:

- Smelling Bottles

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The Gustatory Sense:

- The Tasting Bottles

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The sensorial Introduction to Algebra:

- The Binomial Cube

- The Trinomial Cube