Dear Parents,

June has always been an exciting month with the school holidays, families going on vacation, camps and so on. This year, we added a new event “The Parent’s Day Breakfast” and have received positive responses from parents that it was refreshing, touching and unforgettable. Thank you for your feedback. We are also very encouraged by the outcome of the event and the reactions from the children. It will definitely remain on our annual calendar of events. The teachers have already identified some areas for improvement and you can look forward to a better event next year.

Our annual Night Camp was another resounding success with the children enjoying themselves. We also had good participation in the Student Care’s June Holiday programme and there will be detail write-up about it in the next issue.

For parents who do not have time to monitor your Facebook account often, please re-visit the previous issues of our Newsletter. We have included links at the bottom of the pages featuring past events where you can click and be directed to the exact pages of the corresponding photo albums. As we cannot include all the pictures in the newsletter due to space constraints, please visit our Facebook photo albums to download your children’s pictures.

We hope you liked Ms. Maria’s inaugural column about the Montessori Method and Material in the last issue. Please give us your feedback. In the coming issues, Ms. Maria will highlight at least 1 material but if there is something you are particularly interested in, please email the school and Ms. Maria will try to include that material as soon as possible or refer you to websites where the information can be found. We also highlight relevant websites and video of children working on the material for your easy reference.

Thank you and enjoy reading.

Yours sincerely,
Yeo Hwee Fung
Director

Principal‛s Message

"This is the beginning of the development of the intellect and it is brought about by the intelligence working in a concentrated way on the impressions given by the sense." (Phoebe Child)

Sensorial Materials

Young children experience their world through their senses - color, size, dimension, shape, form, sound, texture, flavour, and smell. To enable them to continue their creative journey of development, we need to help them identify, classify and express the impressions they are receiving through their senses. To aid them in this journey Maria Montessori designed the Sensorial Materials and wrote a prescribed set of procedure after observing her children.

These materials have qualities that simplify and isolate so as to allow ease in experiencing contrasting differences, comparing for similarities or grading sets into a proper order. These sensorial exercises offer children concrete experiences in comparing and classifying their environment. Engaging their attention with hands-on and repetitive work, the materials allow children to discover the keys for exploring their environment. Besides enhancing the senses these materials also aid in the development of language and mathematical concepts.

It is essential that the directress (teacher) carefully present the materials to the children as many of the materials have built-in control of error i.e. it allows the children to realize their mistake and self-correct while working. This is where realization sets in. Though there is an initial prescribed presentation, variations may be invented by the children that lead to discovery and new understanding of relationships.

These materials are divided into six areas to correspond with the five senses of all human beings. However, Maria Montessori added a sixth sense. This was called the stereognositc sense. It came from two Greek words: stereos meaning “solid” and gnosis meaning “knowledge”. These set of materials allow the recognition of objects by combining the sense of touch and movement.

Visual Discrimiation – refining the sense of sight to help the child discriminate color, dimension, shape, and form.

Materials for discriminating colour:
Colour Box 1
Colour Box 2
Colour Box 3

Materials for discriminating dimension:
Cylinder Blocks
Pink Tower
Brown Stair
Red Rods for length.

Materials for discriminating shape:
Geometric Cabinet
Geometric Solids
Constructive Triangles
Binomial Cubes
Trinomial Cubes

Auditory sense - developing the sense of hearing helps in discerning the slightest difference in sound and music.

Sound Cylinders
Silence Game
The Montessori Bells
Tactile sense – enhancing the sense of touch and the perception of weight.

Materials to teach the difference in texture and the intensity of temperature:
Mystery Bags
The Fabric Boxes
Thermic Tablets
Thermic Bottles

Materials to help in the discernment of weight:
The Baric Tablets
Oflactory sense – developing the sense of smell.

The Smelling Bottles
Gustatory sense – developing the sense of taste to allow for the experience of sweet, salt, sour and bitter.

The Taste Bottles
Stereognostic sense – the stereognostic sense gives the child "solid knowledge" to perceive and understand size, form, shape, and nature of a solid object.

Mystery Bags
Geometric Solids
Practical Life sorting trays
The Knobbed Cylinders

These were among the first materials Maria Montessori devised for three- to six-year olds. There are four sets and each is different. The cylinder block is graduated in size by differences in diameter and height.

The knob on the cylinder is among the many preparations for writing in that the young child has to use the "pincer grip" to grasp it. The blocks are self-correcting; if they are not done correctly, there will be a block that does not fit left over at the end. This is when the real learning takes place. The child has to solve the problem of the cylinder that will not fit. When they are successful, they will repeat the exercise many times.

Lessons learnt from this activity:

1) The child learns to judge size by sight (spatial awareness).

2) The child reaches an abstract conception of dimension, and this interest and knowledge enable him to observe the environment with intelligence.

3) The child develops coordination of movement.

4) The child is given an indirect preparation for writing. The fingers and thumb, which will later hold the pencil, are being used to hold the knobs. These digits are also used in the manipulation of most tools (e.g. spoon, scissors, brush). Therefore, the hand is being trained for manipulative skill.

5) Teaching of vocabulary such as tall, short, big, little, thick and thin, bigger, biggest, smaller, smallest, taller tallest, shorter, shortest, thinker, thickest, thinner, thinnest etc.

6) A preparation for mathematics (pre-Maths concepts).

When children have mastered each block, they will be encouraged to combine two, three, and eventually all four blocks. Another extension of this exercise is to have the children complete the blocks blindfolded to enhance on their tactile sense and estimation.

Reference : http://elanvitale.org/knobbedcylinders.html & http://homepage.mac.com/montessoriworld/mwei/sensory/scylindr.html

Video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeyQ5VRm_S4

Click on the following link to have a glimpse of children doing pouring activity.