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Understanding the Sensorial Environment Series: Part 1June 9, 2008 by Miss Norma | No comments

The sensorial environment is an area that younger children show the most interest in the classroom. They will go into this area and spend all morning exploring and playing with the enticing equipment. They are first drawn to it because of their familiarity with the equipment and because of its visual appearance. They enjoy being creative and exploring all of the potential things they can do with the equipment. The children in my classroom sometimes go around the environment feeling and touching everything on the shelves. They then choose an activity and spend hours figuring out what else they can do with it besides the lesson given. Sometimes they just lay out materials, look at them, and put them right back on the shelf. At times they will comment by saying, “This is heavy” when carrying the broadest Brown Stair or “This is cold” when touching the Thermic Tablets. One of my students was so interested that immediately following a lesson given to another student on the Brown Stairs she said “I want to do that.” Another time a child said, “Oh wow” once she saw that I had laid out the Red Rods. It brings me joy to see that the children find so much interest in the materials once I have presented them.

While children love imitating what you show them it is inevitable that they will also make it their own by changing it in some way. I have observed children in my classroom doing many different things with the equipment. The Red Rods is one of the pieces of equipment they love to play with. One of the variations I have observed is them making a maze and then trying to walk in between the rods without stepping on them. By using the equipment in this way they are learning to have control of their movements and are becoming more aware of their space. Other equipment that they utilize includes the Brown Stair and the Pink Tower. Some of the children like to pretend to build a city with this particular equipment. It is extremely interesting to see them turn into architects. They will stand the brown blocks to make them into skyscrapers and then lay some of them down flat to insinuate houses. Through the exploration of this material they are developing a perception of their surrounding environment and the differing sizes of real world objects.