by Purple Doodles

Created on: April 02, 2009   Last Updated: April 04, 2009

One of the best things that we can do for our children by way of development is to expose them to a host of sensorial experiences. Senses are the gateways to intelligence for a child. When they deck themselves up with various such sensorial experiences they carry forth these memories and images and integrate them with their intelligence.

Sensorial activities involve working with materials and activities that assist in the development of sensory organs. The aim of the sensorial materials is fine-tuning of the sensorial perceptions: visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, thermic, baric, sterognostic, and chromatic. The sensorial activities are designed to bring meaning and order to the wide range of sense impressions that the child accumulates sight, taste, touch, smell and sound. Subsequently, they play a key role in the development of intelligence, because the sensory organs are the scouts for gathering information.

Some of the Common Characteristics of the Sensorial Materials:

Each material isolates one particular quality. This helps train the child to perceive minute differences between objects, a fore-runner to discrimination and observation.

Sensorial materials are actually "materialized abstractions". An abstract concept, such as size or weight is made concrete so the child has a better understanding of the quality and learns how to work with it.

Sensorial materials are attractive but also very simple, designed to be as close to reality as possible. This is important to create clarity in the child's mind about the real quality that is sought to be taught.

The Sensorial materials are also self-correcting in nature. The materials are designed to allow the child to spot its error and correct it himself, which in turn builds his confidence and independence.

Sensorial activities yield the best results when they are presented in a logical sequence leading from the simple to the abstract.

Sensorial activities also lay the foundation for the higher order mental challenges such as math, music, language and art, by exposing the child to various concepts.

The sensorial activities can be categorized based on the outcome they seek to imbibe in the child. Namely:

Visual: This is the ability of the eyes to perceive and organize visual images such as dimensions, shapes and colors. Auditory: This is the sense of hearing. The sensorial activities fine-tune the auditory sense to differentiate tone and pitch and categorize sounds into noise, silence, patterned sounds and un-patterned sounds. Tactile: This is the sense of touch. Children learn tactile impressions such as textures, feel etc. Surface touch, stereognostic (whole form, volume), thermic (temperatures), and baric (differences in weights) could also be classified under the sense of touch. Olfactory: This is the sense of smell. Children learn to discriminate between good and bad odors and make the connection between eating and smelling. Gustatory: This is the sense of taste. The child learns to recognize tastes such as sweet, bitter, sour, salt etc.

The above five types of sensorial activities in turn combine to create a series of logical sequence of activities. Matching, pairing, sorting and grading are some examples of sensorial activities. Each of these activities are designed to help the child organize and categorize his sensory perceptions into an inner mental order, which then becomes the basis for more advanced mental activities later on.

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