Montessori Sensorial Education With Beads

Montessori Sensorial Education With Beads can be an excellent, interesting extension project with the other didactic, learning tools that we see in the Montessori environment like the Pink cubes, Red rods or the Brown Stairs.

“There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in some way in the senses”- Maria Montessori

Sensorial education or the refinement of the five senses is extremely important especially in the pre-reading, pre-writing stage in a child's life. Early childhood educators find that this is the fundamental step for the preparation of the mathematical mind.

The ingenuity of the Montessori sensorial materials or learning tools like the Pink Cubes or the Red Rods lies in the precision in designing these materials. The pink cubes are a set of cubes, each one increasing 1 cm in dimension from the previous one.. The smallest one is 1cm, the next one 2cm,... the largest one is 10 cm. The child only notices large, larger, largest at this phase, but the seed for precise discrimination is planted.

All the cubes are of the same color. Here the focus is – just the discrimination in size.

At home, even if we do not have such didactic material,Montessori Sensorial Education With Beads can offer the same concept to the child and try to cultivate his visual discremination skill with beads.

Let us gather some Czech glass cube beads, of the same color and sizes- 8mm, 6mm, 4mm, 2mm.

Let us show the child how to put them in order from the largest to the smallest size.

Once the concept is clear to the child various different shapes may be given, like a set of round beads, bicones, cylindrical of 8mm, 6mm, 4mm, 2mm may be added to make it more interesting and increase the child's concentration level.. I'd keep all the colors same. Our goal is to focus on the discrimination in size.

This excercise may be extended to another sense too- for example,the sense of taste. We may offer some watermelons precisely cut into sets of three different sizes to incorporate the idea of large, larger and largest.

We may even include the child in the preparation of cutting the watermelons, once shown how to cut them safely. Make sure to emphasize and demonstrate good cooking hygiene, like washing the hands before touching food, not eating while cooking for others (we want to make sure our saliva does not get onto other's food) and so on. I'd use a plastic knife and give fairly large cut pieces for the child to start with.

Another day we might bring some honey-dew melons or cantaloupes and have lots of conversation about big, bigger, biggest, small, smaller, smallest..

A story about Goldilocks and the Three Bears will be a nice addition too from the language area.

After

Montessori sensorial education with beads please go to the Home Page for more option.