Preschool children are particularly sensitive to various senses and are in a sensitive period of various senses. Sensory is the window of the soul, which is very important for the development of intelligence. Sensory training is closely related to the cultivation of intelligence.
The cultivation of intelligence depends first on feeling, collecting facts and distinguishing them through feeling, and making children's impressions of things clear and pure through feeling training. This is an intellectual and cultural study in itself, and it is the first step of intellectual development.
Montessori's sensory education includes sensory training such as touch, vision, hearing, smell and taste.
Tactile training is to help children distinguish whether an object is smooth or rough, whether the temperature is hot or cold, whether the object is light or heavy, thick or thin, long or short, and its shape.
Visual training is to help children identify geometric figures with different shapes, colors, sizes and heights.
Listening training is mainly to let children get used to distinguishing and comparing the differences of sounds, and to cultivate their initial aesthetic and appreciation ability in the process of listening training.
Smell and taste training focuses on improving children's sensitivity to smell and taste.
Through this kind of sensory training, children can become more keen observers, enhance and develop their general sensory ability, and make their various senses in a more satisfactory state of preparation to complete complex actions such as reading and mathematics.
Sensory education should follow the principle of step by step, according to the characteristics of children in sensitive period, take muscle exercise as the basis of sensory exercise, and focus on the development of various senses. At the same time, according to the individual differences of children, we should take consistent steps and methods to link sensory education with teaching activities such as reading, writing and arithmetic, so as to realize the transition from simple to complex.
Montessori carefully designed a set of teaching AIDS to train the senses. He organically linked sensory education with the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic, paid attention to the use of hands and brains, and mobilized the cooperation and coordination of various senses. So that children can enter the primary stage of learning to read, write and calculate unconsciously according to their own development progress without psychological pressure. In the process of sensory training, it is in line with children's age characteristics and cognitive laws to adopt decomposition method to decompose the complex whole sense into simple parts for training and to use sequential stimuli to understand things.