Montessori Materials

Materials are part of the environment and help in consolidating the physical and psychological aspects of life. The Montessori materials are tangible and hence called as concrete means of development. When comparing the means of development in a Montessori environment, and the pedagogical aids in traditional schools, the factors for which the Montessori equipment is superior are:

• The material offered is more precise and specific. This helps the child to utilize his/her mental capacities and thus reach the stage of conceptualization.
• The material is in accordance with the psychological technique to isolate the concepts. For instance, colours are limited, but their intensity is unlimited. This helps the child to explore, which in turn helps the child to move from simple to complex regarding the structure and manipulation.
• Each material helps the child for the future tasks taking into consideration the past and present. This helps the child to build his or her self-confidence.
• The material also helps the child in concretized abstractions, which means moving from concrete concepts to abstract ones.

The accuracy and precision with which the material is offered helps in self-learning. The sensory material is designed so that the child not only recognizes the mistakes he/she makes, but also corrects them himself/herself successfully. The right time to present the material to the child is decided upon by the directress, by observation and considering the individual rhythm of the child.

The sensorial materials respond to how children learn at 2 ½ years of age – 6 years of age through the senses rather than the intellect. There are materials for the refinement of each sense, each activity isolating a particular quality, such as colour, size, intensity, taste or weight. For example, the material known as the pink tower is made up of ten pink cubes of varying sizes. The 3-year-old constructs a tower with the largest cube on the bottom and the smallest on top. This material imparts the concept of size. The cubes are all the same colour and texture; the only difference is their size and of course weight. Other materials impart different concepts: colour tablets for colour, geometry materials for form, and so on.

As the child’s exploration continues, the materials interrelate and build upon each other. Later, in the elementary years, new aspects of certain materials come into play. When studying volume, for instance, the child may return to the pink tower and discover that its cubes progress incrementally from one cubic centimetre to one cubic decimetre. At the early childhood (2 ½ – 6 Years), when the child is bombarded by sensory information, these materials help the child order and make sense of his/her world and heighten his/her perception of it as well as his/her sense of wonder.