Young children love exploring things with their hands, and who wouldn’t when there are so many fun textures to explore! Maria Montessori noticed that exploring things using the tactile sense helps the child to come to a deeper understanding of their environment, so she incorporated the sense of touch in many of her materials. You can see that in the sandpaper numbers and the sandpaper letters, of course, and we present many materials like the geometric cabinet and the knobbed cylinders by tracing a finger around the perimeter — but what lesser-known Montessori materials can you put on your work shelves for children who are really interested in exploring that tactile sense?
The rough and smooth boards are materials you may find in a Montessori classroom, and they’re used for noticing the difference between rough and smooth. I like to go a step further and use them for sorting objects around the classroom!
You can also use the sense of touch to sort by hot and cold! There is a traditional Montessori material for this called the thermic tablets, but you could also just fill pairs of water bottles with warm, room temp, and iced water for your child to match.
Another favorite is texture matching! In order to make sure the child is really sorting by the sense of touch and not just by which materials LOOK the same, I like to do it with small materials inside balloons:
Another work you can prepare for your shelves is a crayon rubbing work. Set up a tray with some paper, crayons, and a couple different nature objects — then show your child how to make a rubbing to reveal the different textures on the paper!
Removing the sense of sight from Montessori materials is another great way to work on the sense of touch! Add a blindfold to your pink tower, or put a bunch of objects in stereognostic bag and have your child feel them without looking and try to name what they are.
And don’t forget to incorporate different texture words in your language work! Verbally introduce descriptive words for textures: rough, bumpy, smooth, slippery, slimy, etc. Older kids can do this with the movable alphabet — give them a few objects to describe, then let them build words with the movable alphabet.
