Sensational Sensorial Part 1: May I Introduce the Knobbed Cylinders
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Sensational Sensorial Part 1: May I Introduce the Knobbed Cylinders

Sensorial activities in the Montessori environment are the “keys to the world” for the child. They are self-correcting, hands-on materials that help your child develop logical thinking for future mathematical purposes, powers in visual discrimination, attaining the perfect pitch, heightened tactile awareness and olfactory prowess.

The child’s mind is like a camera taking images of what they absorb with their senses. Soon whatever they capture in their mind is absorbed and internalized. Once internalized, the child can go out into the world and make connections with what’s around them.

The knobbed cylinders are what I would call a material that grows with the child. These are the first set of sensorial materials introduced. During early in childhood, when the child is in the special sensitive stage of order, and when the muscle memory of the hand has the proclivity to sort objects by shape and size is when the Knobbed Cylinders have their greatest intellectual impact on the child.

There are four blocks of these materials, each possessing cylindrical knobs with differing heights and dimensions. This activity heightens the VISUAL sense of the child. The child is merely holding the cylinders with their three fingers on the knob.  They are then visually discriminating and retaining what they see.

  • when first introduced to a child, they are merely taking out each knob IN ORDER
  • to add a challenge, the child learns to mix up the knobs but the sequence by which they are removed and placed back are still in order, left to right
  • when the child has worked diligently with 2, they can work with them together but ensuring the sequence is kept
  • as the child gets a bit older, they can work with 3 blocks and then 4
  • the child can internalize the dimensions by “distance pairing” —removing the knobbed cylinders on one table in order with the cylinders placed further away and then trying to find the correct knob per hole by challenging their memory with the distance

How does this help the child?

  • it develops the logical mathematical mind
  • it heightens the visual sense as develops the mind to discriminate between various dimensions and heights so that the child can one day make connections to the environment