How many senses do we have?

"The senses, being explorers of the world, 
open the way to knowledge."

Maria Montessori

We typically think of ourselves as having five senses - sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch.  Through these senses the world outside of ourselves is mediated into our brain, and then into our awareness and experience.   It's impossible for us to remember as adults, what it was like to be babies perceiving such a complex and ever-changing world for the first time, learning about it, sense impression by sense impression.  The first sounds, the first music - the first sight of a face, the first sight of a tree - the first touch of mother, the first hurt - the first sweet smell, the first ......  You get the idea.  So many first experiences, and this process which begins in infancy continues on through early childhood.  It's truly amazing neurologically.

In this area of sensory education Maria Montessori once again excelled.    She carefully examined the five senses and thought about how to help the children clarify, order, and deepen their experiences.  She developed an array of materials which work with one sense at a time - what we call the "sensorial materials," the two shelves right in the middle of our room.  She also further refined the work into nine areas by adding more specific senses:  the chromatic or color sense, the thermic or sense of temperature, the baric or sense of weight, and the stereognostic, which is the tactile or muscular sense.

The many sensorial materials and the different ways they can be used are at the heart of our work with children.  In these first  photos, you can see Konrad working with the sequencing of colors, from darkest to lightest shade.  No other sense is involved, it is pure color awareness.
Megan was matching the sound cylinders, again a single-sense experience, simply hearing.  Trevor was using the colored cylinders to build towers - his sight, touch, and  stereognistic senses were involved.  Terra was using only her tactile sense to sort and replace the knobbed cylinders (after several younger years of experience with eyes open).

In the last ten years, psychologists and therapists have delineated even more categories which are valuable additions to our understanding of the complexities of sensory development.  Proprioception is the sense of our body's and limbs' position in space.  The vestibular sense is the information from the inner ear, one's sense of position in the world, how head and body move through space. These muscular senses develop at very different rates in different children, and in recent years a whole specialty of sensory integration support has developed among physical therapists.    So these three-year-olds in their spontaneous shared yoga pose?  They are exercising their sense of balance - or our new word, proprioception!


In recent weeks we've had the tasting work out.  It is another carefully isolated activity, exposing the children to sweet, salty, sour, and bitter in a pure form.  In classic Montessori there are two sets of dropper bottles, for matching, but for myself, I decided years ago that it was too tedious to match each taste.  So it is purely experiential, and so much fun to observe how each child handles the experience.

Ava has been most equanimous, willing to taste the "pleasant" and "unpleasant" equally, every time she does it.  The others, not so much! There's no mistaking which taste Lucas was experiencing here - ah the uniqueness of bitter.  I always tell them that the bitter taste is made from plants that are good for their bodies (it's actually "Swedish Bitters" from New Seasons, diluted.) Funny how Erin and I find that the sweet dropper bottle becomes empty faster than the others do!

So here are your children at Chickadee, absorbing and ordering their impressions about the world, step by step, using every single sense separately and together.  This development continues over their months and years of primary Montessori, and this work has a tremendous cumulative effect, in building sensitivity, intelligence, and awareness.  It's not something they will be able to tell you - "Mom, I was working with my tactile sense today."   At most, you might hear, "I love the tasting work," or, "I built the tallest tower."   But you can know that every sensorial activity has multiple benefits, and you can remember that, in Montessori's words,  "A child is by his nature an avid explorer of his surroundings, because he has not yet had the time or the means of knowing them precisely."