Within the beautiful materials of the Sensorial area, you’ll find specific lessons designed to support the child’s developing visual discrimination. The ability to discern subtle differences in visual stimuli develops over time and practice. Newborns notice differences between bold strokes of black and white. By adulthood, typical vision can capture about one million distinctive colors. And if you’ve got the right genes for it, you might see a hundred times more. But even tho

Materials across the Montessori classroom work together to respond to children's development from multiple angles. Some share similar direct objectives. Some support the same facets of development through indirect objectives. The materials for auditory discrimination in the Sensorial area work together to refine the child's ability to perceive differences in sound, so that that perception can be used in other areas to learn language, music and other stimuli. Auditory developm

Walk into a Montessori Early Childhood classroom anywhere in the world and you are likely to spot a set of materials unique to Montessori but common among Montessori classrooms. The Sensorial lessons, hands-on, didactic, elegant manipulatives that build and refine children's sensitivity to the physical world, are some of the most recognized Montessori materials. But why do we spend so much time focused on the children's senses? If you're a student of philosophy, you may have

One of our favorites, the Broad Stair or Brown Stair is a constant attraction in the Montessori classroom. A frequent partner to the Pink Tower, the Broad Stair shares some qualities in common with its upright partner: dimensions in diminishing tenths that support the Base-10 system and the proportions of the base of each prism. But while the Pink Tower teaches children about the relationship of size and weight, the Broad Stair teaches children to distinguish by thickness. Ea

There are some parts of the Montessori classroom that seem to get all the attention: the beautiful Practical Life materials, the engaged constructions in the Sensorial area, the precise Math lessons or the carefully sequenced Language materials. But there's another area of the classroom that's often overlooked: the Cultural Materials. The Cultural materials introduce the child to his or her place in the world, offering the child opportunities to learn about place and commu

There are few materials that can claim to be as fully-engaging as the Red Rods. Prominent in the Sensorial area, the Rods are an immediate attraction to children because of their precise proportions, scale and vibrant color. After a careful presentation, the child can practice carefully carrying each rod from the shelf to a floor mat, placing each silently and with great attention on the mat and, when all ten rod have been placed, aligning them by length. Like the other Senso

You'd be hard pressed to visit any Montessori early childhood classroom in the world and not find the Knobbed Cylinders on the shelf. From the first block that finds its way into the Toddler classrooms to the full complement of four cylinder blocks that the Early Childhood classrooms enjoy, the Knobbed Cylinders are a foundational material that naturally attracts the young child to work. Designed to isolate the relationship between dimension and volume, each cylinder block of

Some of our favorite Montessori materials are the ones that make elegant and simple seemingly complicated concepts. The math materials are especially good at this, translating concepts you may have learned (or misunderstood!) in high school into engaging puzzles appropriate for young children to explore. The Square of the Decanomial is one such material. Beautiful and orderly, this material makes concrete the relationships of multiplied squares for as many as ten variables

The Montessori materials all share certain qualities. They are beautiful. They are precise. They are didactic. They offer an isolated concept to master. They are self-correcting. Because the materials share these qualities all at once, they often address concepts that may be more complicated than you'd expect for a preschool classroom. A perfect example is the Trinomial Cube, a cube constructed of twenty-seven different wooden prisms, each representing a different combination

The Montessori Math materials are distinct for their ability to make concrete otherwise abstract concepts and, by doing so, to allow children to master mathematical concepts and relationships earlier than you may remember having learned them in school. Take the fraction materials, for example. While children use fractions all the time ("Can I have just half the cookie?") most traditional math sequences don't introduce them until Elementary school. In Montessori classrooms, th