Aiding to the Construction of the Child’s Intelligence through the Education and Exploration of the Senses

When infants first interact with the world, they don’t have words to describe what they encounter, so they absorb their surroundings and new information through their senses. They experience the external world through the use of their senses. Our eyes help us see, our ears let us hear, our hands help us feel, our noses let us smell, and our tongues help us taste. 

Children are spontaneous learners. Every day is a new opportunity for a child to learn. You can use almost anything surrounding you to help stimulate a child’s senses. Begin by experimenting with different smells, watch their expressive language for likes and dislikes. Visit a park, find nature objects to touch, taste, smell, using language to describe what you’re experimenting with. Children respond differently to sensory experiences. These experiences can greatly improve their motor skills, raise awareness of the world around them, and contribute to language acquisition. They can also be quite therapeutic. Enhancing and building upon the child’s senses helps improve their social, emotional, cognitive, physical and language development.

Learning Through Sensory Discovery

Our HBMH friends have been enjoying this week’s Summer Camp theme, “Learning through Sensory Discovery”. With so many options to choose from, they are invited each day to pick and choose which sensorial materials they would like to work with, then given the opportunity to create and manipulate a masterpiece of their own. It is truly amazing to see their creativity unfold as they put their minds (and hands) to work.

Our camp themes were designed to feature creative hands-on activities that build skills, bodies, and excitement. We offer an environment that fits the needs and interests of all our children, incorporating Montessori principles that foster independence and freedom with responsibility. I’m hoping to update our blog all summer long to show the children as they progress through the different themes.

Children use their senses to learn. At a very young age, they have a natural desire to discriminate objects by their similarities and differences, using their visual, auditory, tasting, olfactory (smelling) and tactile abilities. Each sensorial material in the Montessori classroom was designed to better define these abilities, not to mention all of the abstract lessons the child is learning from the same work such as introduction to language, reading, writing, math, and so forth. Children are given the opportunity to exercise their senses through working with different textures, colors, shapes, dimensions, masses, tastes, smells, temperatures, pitches and intensity of sounds. Not only do these works advocate creative expression, but they also promote abstract thinking.

I chose to work with the knobless cylinders. Using a guide, I created a beautiful design, displaying each group of cylinders by their relationships in height and diameter.

By diminishing my vision, I’m able to utilize my tactile senses to feel the lengths and heights of each cube as I build my tower in decreasing size.

The bright colors of the yellow cylinders and pink tower stimulate my visual senses. Each cube and cylinder is graded by decreasing size and diameter, and placed in order to create a tower taller than my body! This work is also indirectly preparing me for counting, geometry, and other mathematical lessons by giving me an in depth understanding of varying dimensions.

I’ve chosen to work with the Color Box III, which allows me to grade the tablets by intensity of color (darkest to lightest).

Our Apple friends participated in a group activity to test their auditory senses. Using different musical instruments and a blindfold, Ms. Patti tests our ability to identify and distinguish between each sound.

Resources: The Namta Journal, Volume 37, Number 1, Winter 2012