One aspect of the Montessori Curriculum includes hands-on learning. Maria Montessori believed that the hand was the direct link to the mind. She sought to fully engage the child by incorporating sensory activities that awakened the child's spirit. The direct aims of all of the activities is to increase the child's observation skills of the world around her. After all, observation is the best way to learn to appreciate the world around you. Within the Montessori Sensorial area of the classroom, materials are designated to isolate one sense at a time, to truly refine it. These senses include visual (seeing), auditory (hearing), olfactory (smelling), gustatory (tasting), and tactile (touching). The tactile sense is further divided into stereognostic (muscular) and thermic (heat). The chromatic sense (color) is a subcategory of the visual sense.
From:
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