Dos en un mismo concepto: identidad cultural y nacional

A G^UIDEDT^{OUR OF}M^ONTESSORIC^LASSROOMS— S^ENSORIALE^XERCISES

Some people have heard that in Montessori, children are taught that there is only one way to work with each material. In truth, the children explore and discover all sorts of creative ways to work with them. For example, students will construct the Tower horizontally, or line up two edges to create a vertical stairway. The children will also build the Pink Tower in various combinations with the Brown Stair (described on page 68), along with some of the other Sensorial materials.

The Pink Tower is one of the Sensorial materials that children enjoy working with early in their Montessori experience. The Pink Tower, or

“Tower of Cubes,” is composed of a graduated series of ten wooden cubes. The largest cube has a square section of 10 centimeters per side and is 10 centimeters high. Thus, it measures 10 x 10 x 10 centimeters. The square section and height of each of the succeeding cubes decreases by 1 centimeter down to the smallest cube which measures 1 x 1 x 1 centimeter.

Children carefully carry the Tower, cube by cube, to the little rug that defines their work area. They carry each cube comfortably at waist height as they take the cubes and place them in random order upon the carpet.

As they manipulate the cubes and carry them across the room, the children get a very strong impression of size and weight. When all the cubes have been carried to the rug, the child looks for the largest one and begins to build the Tower, one cube at a time. At each step, he looks through the cubes that have not yet been added to the Tower to find the largest.

As each is placed on the Tower, the child con-trols his movements to place the cube gently down right in the center of the larger cube on which it is rested. Once the Tower has been constructed, the child carefully takes it down and either begins again or returns the cubes, one by one, to their proper place on the shelf.

(Above and right) The Pink Tower

The Red Rods are a series of ten rods (thin rectan-gular prisms) in which the height and width are uniform; how-ever, they range in length from 1 decimeter (10 centimeters) to a full meter (10 decimeters or 100 centimeters). The child scatters the rods around her rug and looks for the longest.

As each is arranged along-side the others in a series, they help the child discover the reg-ular progression

of length. The teachers introduce vocabulary:

short, shorter, shortest; long, longer, longest.

The Red Rods are quite similar to the Red and Blue Rods in the Math area, which help the child learn to count by showing the growth of quantity as length, distinguished by alternating pat-terns of red and blue to represent each number.

The Brown Stair, which is sometimes called the Broad Stair, is made up of ten rectangular prisms with bases that have exactly the same grad-uated measurements as the cubes of the Pink Tower, but which are uni-formly 20 centimeters long. The child is challenged to scatter them around her rug and then sorts them by size to place all ten prisms in proper order from thickest to thinnest. This results in a graduated series of rectangular prisms that resembles a little stairway. Because the squared sides of each prism correspond to the dimensions of the cubes of the Pink Tower, the two materials are often used together for all sorts of explorations and designs.

(Above and left) The Red Rods (Above) The Brown Stair

The Knobless Cylinders cor-respond to the four Cylinder Blocks. In this material, each of these sets is painted red, yel-low, blue, or green.

With no cyl-indrical holes, the children de-pend upon sight or touch alone to arrange the cylinders.

Children will sometimes work with both the Knobless Cylinders and the more familiar Knobbed Cylinders from the Cylinder Blocks together, finding the match between each brightly painted and unpainted cylinder in turn.

By working with all four sets of Knobless Cylinders together, the chil-dren discover all sorts of geometric patterns and progressions within the material.

The Cylinder Blocks are a set of four naturally finished (unpaint-ed) rectangular blocks of wood, into which have been cut ten cylin-drical holes. Each hole is filled with a matching wooden cylincylin-drical inset fitted with a little knob on the top to make it easy for a child’s small hand to grasp and lift the inset out of its perfectly fitted hole.

Each set of cylinders is constructed to vary in a regular sequence by either diameter, length, or both. The children remove each cylin-der in turn, carefully tracing its length and circumference and the depth and circumference of each hole with one finger.

Once all ten cylinders have been removed and placed on the rug, the children take each in turn and find the hole into which it fits perfectly, with the top of the cylinder flush with the top of the cylin-der block. If they’ve made a mistake, the children can normally see it for themselves because all ten cylinders will not fit correctly.

The children quickly begin to challenge themselves by attempt-ing to “see” which hole is likely to fit the cylinder in their hand rather than trying to fit each into one hole after the other. After a while, they will begin to do the same exercise with their eyes blind-folded, relying on touch alone.

When they are ready for a greater challenge, the children will mix the cylinders from two, three, or all four blocks together and try to fit them all into the corresponding holes.

A G^UIDEDT^{OUR OF}M^ONTESSORIC^LASSROOMS— S^ENSORIAL

(Above) The Knobbed Cylinder Blocks

The child above is working with one set of the Knobbed Cylinders.

(Above and right) The Knobless Cylinders

Touch: The children commonly put on blindfolds to add an additional level of challenge as they sort or construct with the Sensorial materials. They love to explore their sense of touch.

One of the children’s favorite activities is the Mystery Bag. Normally, it is simply a cloth bag or box with a hole for their hands in which they touch and manipulate objects that they cannot see. One activity is to place things that are familiar to the children inside, and chal-lenge them to identify them by touch alone.

Another exercise begins with the Rough and Smooth Boards, which have a surface that alternates between the roughness of sandpaper and a smooth finished surface. The children wash their hands in warm water before beginning to make them more sensitive.

The Color Tablets (left) help the child learn to distinguish among primary and secondary colors and shades, while mas-tering the words used to describe each color and shade. There are three separate boxes of Color Tablets. All of the tablets have the same shape and differ only in color. The first box of Color Tablets contains six tablets, two each of yellow, red, and blue.

The children simply match the pairs and learn the spoken names of the colors.

The second box of Color Tablets contains eleven pairs of secondary colors, which the children match and name. The third box of Color Tablets contains seven different shades of nine different colors, which the children learn to sort in order from darkest to lightest shade. When all the tablets are laid out, they create a lovely display of color.

There are many ways in which the children and teachers can make the Color Tablets more challenging. For example, chil-dren can try to find the tablet that is closest in color to some-thing in the environment. Another challenge is to give the child a Color Tablet from the third box and ask him to go to the box and, by memory alone, bring back the tablet that is just one shade lighter or darker.