02/18/2026
Montessori Tid Bits: Sensorial Learning
From ages two to six, generally, a child is in their sensitive period for refining their senses. This makes them especially fascinated by experiences using their senses!
Does your child love to play in the water instead of washing their hands? Or, perhaps, your child hears small sounds that you don’t pick up at first? Do they want to touch and feel everything? This is all developmentally appropriate!
The Montessori classroom offers children many opportunities to explore the world with their senses, and the teachers encourage their curiosity and wonderment as the child explores, asks questions, and makes predications.
The materials in the early childhood classroom draw a child in because they are beautiful, orderly, and a child gets to move their body with them. All of the Sensorial materials are designed to help a child classify, clarify, and better understand the world around them. They refine their senses with the materials as they see which cube is the largest, listen to which shaker is the loudest, smell which candles have the same scent, taste the difference between sweet and salty, and feel the difference between light and heavy.
A bonus to Sensorial learning is that the child is preparing for reading, writing, and math activities as they refine order of work, fine motor coordination, concentration, and independence! Modern research has also shown that consciously engaging in using multiple senses is a key to stronger, more lasting memory formation in adulthood.
Try telling your child a simple story about making and eating breakfast with all the sensory input imaginable: “I heard the bacon sizzling and smelled its smoky sweetness…and when I bit into the crispy slice of bacon I could taste the salt…”
