Art is essential – it is a way for children to express themselves, to communicate and to develop their fine motor skills. And it is fun! At St Andrew’s Montessori, we celebrate creativity and have art and craft supplies at the ready for children to explore and get lost in. In her book The Absorbent…
The Pink Tower is a sensorial material that teaches children sizing, dimension and order. It consists of 10 wooden cubes, ranging in size from 1 cubic centimetre to 10 cubic centimetres, differing in three dimensions. Lessons with the Pink Tower aim to refine a child's visual sense by discriminating differences in dimension and interestingly, little…
The hexagon box shows children how different shapes can be used to create other shapes; more specifically, that by joining together different triangles, four-sided figures are formed. The sensorial angle of the lesson means that it can be presented without the use of language but also works as an introduction to geometry for an older…
When doing sensory work in the classroom at St. Andrew’s Montessori, we engage in a variety of exercises that help children isolate each of their five senses in an effort to nurture an awareness and understanding of each particular sense. Smelling Jars is one of the activities we use to help children isolate their sense…
The purpose of the lesson using rough and smooth boards is to teach children to use their sense of touch when exploring the world around them. It’s a simple activity that can easily be replicated at home. All you need is: four varying grades of sandpaper cut into squares and glued onto individual pieces of…
The Sound Cylinders tutorial is part of the Sensorial area of the Montessori classroom. Through matching sounds, children will learn auditory discrimination as well as a sense of order. There are also some fun extensions that can be applied to this very simple lesson.
Have a look at the below tutorial by My Montessori Works for…
The general rule of thumb is that children are developmentally capable of grasping the concept of colour at around 18-months of age. That said; children are all different and learn uniquely, and so the most constructive approach is to introduce colours to your children whenever it comes up naturally their infancy.
At St Andrew’s Montessori we…
The binomial cube is like a puzzle; broken up into many different pieces of varying colour and sizing. Once assembled, it forms a cube of a binomial (a+b)3 – the direct purpose of the activity is to build the cube (by using skills such as patience and logic) but it also serves as preparation for…
A couple of tutorials ago, we covered Colour Boxes 1 & 2 from the sensorial area of our curriculum. The activities associated with these two boxes focus on primary and secondary colours; once children have mastered the identification of the specified colours, it’s time to move on to Colour Box 3, which focuses on shades…
Colours are such an important part of life, enabling expression and evoking emotion, but it seems to take children ages to figure them out – their names, in particular. There’s a really great article in Scientific American that explores why it is so difficult for children to learn colour names, and one of the primary…