An excerpt from the January 2024 issue of the Bay Farm Beat. By Michele McKale, Toddler House Level Coordinator, Piping Plover Lead Teacher.
Toddlers are natural explorers, navigating the world through their senses. Sounds, textures, tastes, smells, and visual stimuli help toddlers to form their impressions of the world around them.
In a Montessori toddler classroom, we prepare materials for just this purpose. The activities are prepared to offer rich sensory experiences that will help the toddlers isolate each impression they receive from the activity. Maria Montessori stated that “the isolation of the senses is a great help towards the clarity of reception of the impressions.”
Touch: For the sense of touch, one activity we prepare is a basket of textured items. For example, the children have a basket of shells, some smooth, some bumpy, and some rough. We may offer this as exploratory work or as a matching exercise, depending on the child’s developmental level using the materials.
Taste: We often offer tasting exercises in which we will present the children with food that they may not have experienced before. Each child will have a small piece of the food, such as a kiwi or maybe a lemon or lime. We may compare these foods and ask for their impressions of the food. Some may enjoy the sourness of the lime, some may think the kiwi is sour, and some may think it is sweet. Each child will form their own impressions of the tastes and will begin to refine their sense of taste which will help them to begin to expand their palate.
Sound: The auditory sense is strengthened through many of the activities we present in the classroom. By offering ample opportunities to listen to music, to sing at group time, play instruments, and practice identifying sounds, the child’s brain will begin to interpret what it is hearing and create stronger pathways so that the child will be able to better understand the sounds in the world around them.
Smell: For the sense of smell, we will prepare smelling jars in which we place a drop of essential oil or extract on a cotton ball. The children will smell the scent through holes we cut into the lid. Again, we could use this as a matching work or an exploratory exercise.
Sight: The visual sense in a Montessori toddler program is the ability to identify and differentiate forms, objects, colors, and sizes. It is the ability to track movement for deeper exploration. For this, we use color-matching objects, various shape sorters, nesting blocks or cups, and knobbed cylinders. The knobbed cylinders are a block of cylinders of varying heights and diameter. The knobbed cylinders introduce visual discrimination of size and refine the child’s perception of dimension.
A few other senses are less commonly referred to but are essential to Montessori education. These are stereognostic, thermic, baric, and vestibular senses.
The stereognostic sense is muscle memory. It is the ability to recognize something only through the sense of touch. For this, we use what is called the mystery bag. We will place a few objects in a bag and ask the child to feel around inside the bag to identify the objects. The thermic sense is the sense of varying temperatures. We may use warm, cool, and cold water to help the child distinguish between the different temperatures. We may also use objects like felt, stone, and steel wool in the bag.
The sense of weight is called the baric sense. We offer the child something heavy, medium-weight, and light. The child will pick up each object to differentiate the weight of the object.
The vestibular sense, crucial for the development of young children, is all about balance and body spatial awareness. Children may struggle with stillness, coordination, and focus without a well-developed vestibular sense. But fear not; the vestibular system is strengthened through fun and engaging movement exercises like swinging, rolling, and spinning.
