The materials we call "toys" are called "working materials" in Montessori education, that is, Montessori teaching AIDS. On Tuesday, under the leadership of Teacher Huang, we studied and explored some Montessori teaching AIDS. In the process of mutual exhibition and communication, I found that every Montessori teaching aid can find similarities, and they all have certain relevance. The book also mentioned that some teaching AIDS can be combined to play a role.
For example, Pink Tower and Brown Ladder are two sets of teaching AIDS. The pink tower is pink as its name implies, but it is not a complete tower. The teaching aid consists of cubes of different sizes, from small to large, with a total of ten cubes. The working process is to stack these cubes from the bottom in a way from big to small, and finally a tower. The brown ladder is also composed of ten brown cuboids with the same length but different heights. Arranging from low to high is our daily stair form. The function of these two sets of teaching AIDS is to enhance the children's small muscle movement, train their coordination and stability, and enhance their multi-angle and multi-directional observation and arrangement ability. The simplest way to play is to stack two sets of teaching AIDS at the same height or tile them to the same length, and deepen them. You can also combine two sets into a sun shape, a maze shape and so on. Know the size of the object, feel the change of three-dimensional space, and understand the relationship between subtraction and increase in continuous operation.
There is also a temperature sensitive plate. The purpose of this teaching aid is to help children improve their temperature perception. At first, there were two rectangular boards made of wood, two rectangular boards made of iron, two rectangular boards made of felt, two rectangular boards made of marble, two rectangular boards made of glass and two rectangular boards made of cork. The process is to put these pairs of materials into semi-circular arcs respectively, and guide children to feel the temperature of one material through their wrists to find the other half. The process of his search is stipulated by the route, which subtly enhances the child's ability of distance memory in the process of operation. What I want is to encourage children to look for other materials, such as foam board and ceramic tile board, after they are familiar with the original materials, so as to enrich the diversity of materials, improve the difficulty of games and enhance their ability to judge objects through touch.
Through my own research and listening to the ideas of other colleagues, I think Montessori teaching AIDS have many extended uses in life and knowledge learning. For example, the pink tower is not only a visual sensory teaching aid, but also can subtly pave the way for children's future mathematics knowledge in their operation. Moreover, the pink tower and the brown ladder are very similar to the building blocks we play in our daily life, except that ordinary building blocks contain rich colors and various shapes, while the pink tower and the brown ladder have only two shapes, which also makes it difficult for children to explore.
The tactile experience of the temperature-sensitive plate is also reflected in life. For example, in daily life, children feel the heat and cold of food through a plate or the temperature of water through a cup. These bits and pieces of touch have become a special experience in Montessori teaching AIDS, just like giving this feeling a formal sense of ceremony.
In children's daily study and life, we should pay attention to all aspects of their external and internal experiences and adopt different ways to meet their various development needs.