The Montessori Sensorial Materials: Part II
Paula Lillard Preschlack • December 16, 2022

What Do Children Do with Montessori’s Sensorial Materials?


Imagine you are watching a four-year-old boy carry a wooden box with a red lid to a table. Then, he goes back to the shelf of Sensorial Materials and brings over a matching box—this one with a blue lid. (These are called the Sound Cylinders. Each is filled with about one ounce of grains of sand ranging from very fine to coarse, in subtle gradations so that each cylinder makes slightly different sounds when shaken).


The boy removes each lid and slides them underneath each corresponding box. He carefully lifts eight wooden cylinders out of the boxes and lines them up in front of each box: the ones with blue tops in front of the blue-lidded box and the ones with reds tops in front of the red-lidded box. He mixes these identical red and blue topped cylinders around, and then lines them up again by color in two columns. He is now organized and ready to begin the game.


He lifts a red-topped cylinder with his left hand and shakes it by his left ear. He then lifts the first blue-topped cylinder with his right hand and shakes it by his right ear; back and forth, he compares the sounds. He decides that they do not match, so he places the blue-topped cylinder in the back of the row of “blue cylinders” and moves on to the second blue-topped cylinder. He does this until he finds one that sounds the same and places this pair in a new column.


He does this with all the cylinders until he has a double column of matching pairs. He checks them one more time, comparing carefully, his eyes soft as he focuses all his attention on the very faint sounds. When he determines he is correct, he mixes them up, deciding he wants to do it again. After the second time through, he puts the materials back on the shelf and moves on to another activity.


This game introduces this young boy to a systematic way to compare qualities and keep the choices already tested in logical order. It gives him an option when he wants to compare other things in life and familiarizes him with an organized way to do math problems or eliminate options when looking for an answer to a “problem” of any kind. Equally important, it helps children to refine their sense of hearing and their capacity for concentration through an entire process. As a bonus, little children think such games are very fun! They love the challenge and the sensorial exploration.


What Characteristics Identify Montessori’s Materials?


There are certain qualities that Dr. Montessori’s Sensorial Materials share. They each isolate a sense or quality to bring the child’s attention to it. There is only one of each material to eliminate confusion. And by “…removing as far as possible all distracting factors…[this] enables the child to engage in an inner and external analysis that can help him to acquire an orderly mind” (Maria Montessori, The Discovery of The Child).


Each sensorial material is:


  • A materialized abstraction
  • Progresses from general to specific
  • From familiar to the unfamiliar
  • Involves physical movement
  • Isolates a difficulty
  • Is limited in certain ways so that it draws in the child’s focus
  • Serves as indirect preparation for something else (learning to read, write, or do arithmetic)
  • Contains an inbuilt control of error
  • Provides a key to the world
  • Has a specified place in a sequence of presentations


Arguably the most exciting thing about the Sensorial Materials are the games that the teacher teaches the children to play with them. There are matching games (where we connect two items with identical qualities), grading games (where we put objects or qualities in an order based on gradation of that quality), and language games (where we name, and sometimes label, qualities as we discover them).


The games are very important because they help children exercise and further develop their memory-building capacities. When we build memorizing techniques in a game-like fashion, we get better at memorizing information and are better able to hold foundational facts in our minds. Here’s a surprise for you: Montessori children are not more intelligent; they’ve just received many more opportunities to develop their minds than children typically get in other educational settings. The games we play with the Sensorial Materials every day is one of the key ways this happens.


What A Wonderful World!


The knowledge the children gain through this specialized set of Montessori materials relates directly to their experience of the world around them. Children have a repertoire of categorized information at their fingertips and the language to identify and name their experiences in the world:


“This is hot. This is cool. This is cold. This is tepid.”
“This feels rough. This feels smooth.”
“This is heavy. This one is heavier. This is long, that is longer, this other one is the longest.”
“This is sour. This is sweet. This is bitter.”
“That is loud. This is louder.”


And even more specifically:


“This is Poland. This is Mexico. This is Bhutan.”
“This is the flag of Iraq.”
“This is an obovate leaf. That one is hastate.”
“This is a pentagon. That is a hexagon.”
“That is lavender. This is fuchsia.”
“This musical note is a C. This note is an F.”


This vocabulary frees the child from ignorance and opens the world to them. Young children explore the world with their senses by nature, and they have absorbent minds which capture immense amounts of vocabulary and information in an almost photographic fashion. Montessori’s approach provides a perfectly matched pathway to developing a sophisticated and exacting way to identify and categorize the qualities in one’s three-dimensional experience of living. Montessori’s materials take abstract qualities and put them into concrete form for children to explore, become familiar with them, and then to identify and call them by name.


One might say that because of their experiences in the classroom with the Sensorial Materials, the child sees the world for the first time with all of its detail. Because of the Botany Cabinet of leaf shapes, the child really notices the various shapes of the leaves on the trees she walks past. Because of the Geometry Cabinet, he notices that a doorframe is a rectangular shape. A child sees that their hardboiled egg is an ovoid, that there are soft and rhythmic sounds of different notes in a song played on the stereo, that the world has so much detail, and every piece of it has a place, a name, and a relation to all else. Suddenly, the world looks different; it has come alive and there is so much more to explore, to learn! As they learn the names for each of these qualities and perceptions, the connections are solidified.


How satisfying this must be for them! Imagine the revelation, the feeling of belonging. This is a practice for developing one’s intelligence, quite literally.


A Foundation for Education


The experiences that 3- and 4-year-old children have with these materials give them minds that can think and bodies they can control—the ultimate preparation for math, language, art, science, and all other knowledge that will follow. Each child is prepared to learn. They each have their own unique system for categorizing new information as it comes in, for memorizing new information, and for learning to identify and organize information. They have the body control and the spatial awareness for laying out math problems and counting, computing, and recording their answers. Learning to read, write, and do math problems is made simple because of the sensorial experiences the children have had as a prerequisite. So, when your child recognizes, “The sky is blue!” or you see them staring at a leaf and hear them whisper, “hastate,” you have the Sensorial Materials to thank.


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A young child outside on a sunny day using a watering can to water potted herbs and flowers

How to Live in an Uncertain World: Optimism Through Montessori

By Margaret J. Kelley • April 20, 2026
Forest Bluff School in Lake Bluff, IL, explores how the Montessori philosophy helps families trade "crippling empathy" and anxiety for a productive, grounded optimism.
A teacher and Montessori student at Forest Bluff School in Lake Bluff, IL, shake hands.

Montessori and Accountability: Developing a Moral Compass

By Alice Davidson with contributions by Margaret J. Kelley • February 25, 2026
In Montessori education, we view each child as inherently capable of developing a strong sense of right and wrong. A child’s moral compass is not something we impose upon them—it is something that grows within, guided by experiences, reflection, and consistent modeling from the adults in their lives. For that moral sense to take root, children must be allowed to experience accountability for their actions. When parents shield their children from consequences or defend behavior they know is wrong, they unintentionally undermine that process, creating confusion and instability in the child’s understanding of truth, fairness, and responsibility. Many parents defend their children out of love and protectiveness. They wish to spare their child from discomfort, embarrassment, or the feeling of failure. Yet this kind of protection, though well-intentioned, teaches the opposite of what true love demands. One of the tenets of Montessori is to put children in contact with the real world in age-appropriate ways, trusting that they have the inner capabilities to grow and adapt when they have real experiences. When parents constantly justify, minimize, or excuse poor behavior, a child misses an opportunity for feedback; they learn that honesty is flexible and that integrity can be negotiated. This erodes their moral foundation and leaves them uncertain about what is right—not because they cannot feel it, but because the adults they trust most are contradicting that inner voice. In Montessori, children learn to do work and make decisions based on intrinsic, not extrinsic motivation. We trust that they have goodness inside of them, and while they absolutely need guardrails and guidelines, we can best serve them by teaching them to distinguish between their internal drives, and to take action in accordance with their conscience. Children are perceptive. They often know when they have done something wrong—whether they spoke unkindly, acted selfishly, or disrespected another. When their parents immediately defend them or blame others, the child experiences an internal conflict. On one hand, their conscience tells them they made a mistake; on the other, the parent’s response tells them they are in the right. Over time, this mismatch between inner truth and external validation creates confusion. The child begins to question their own moral instincts and may even learn to ignore the pangs of conscience altogether, relying instead on external approval to define what is acceptable. This is one of the greatest harms of over-defending a child: it separates them from their natural moral compass. When children are consistently told they are right—even when they know they are not—they start to equate love with being defended rather than being guided. They may learn that relationships are maintained through justification and blame-shifting instead of honesty and repair. Later in life, these patterns can manifest as difficulty accepting feedback, resistance to authority, or an inability to take responsibility in personal and professional relationships. In Montessori classrooms, we see accountability as a cornerstone of growth. When a child makes a mistake—perhaps they take another’s materials without asking or speak rudely to a classmate—we respond not with shame, but with calm guidance. We help the child reflect: What happened? How did this affect others? What can you do to make it right? This process nurtures empathy and clarity. It helps children see that they can correct their mistakes, that doing wrong does not make them bad, and that making amends restores both harmony and self-respect. Accepting that your child can be wrong is not a sign of parental failure—it is a sign of courage and wisdom. When you model accountability yourself, your child learns that truth is not something to be feared. They see that mistakes are part of being human, and that integrity means facing them with grace. Ultimately, allowing your child to experience and accept the consequences of their behavior builds confidence, empathy, and moral clarity. Shielding them from accountability may protect their feelings in the short term, but it confuses their conscience and weakens their inner sense of right and wrong. By guiding them lovingly toward truth and responsibility, you empower them to grow into kind, honest, and self-aware individuals—qualities that form the true foundation of a moral life.