We all know children learn through their senses. You can read about Sensory Play here. Sensory play is any activity that allows babies to safely explore using any combination of their senses in creative and spontaneous ways. SENSORY PLAY exercises can be categorized into: Visual (sight), Tactile (touch), Baric (pressure), Thermic (temperature), Auditory (sounds), Olfactory (smelling), Gustatory (tasting), and Stereognostic.
By providing a variety of baby-friendly, open-ended, every-day materials, your LO has the opportunity to discover how their senses work through play and experimentation. For example, they touch water to understand wet vs dry. They watch to see how mom or dad complete a task, then copy those movements to do it themselves. They listen and mimic sounds to make words.
So how do LOs use their senses to learn things like math and language? It’s through a Montessori Inspired process that’s called moving from concrete to abstract. The objective is to develop the concept first. By using concrete HANDS-ON learning materials during the early, sensitive years, your LO can learn the basic concepts of mathematics and language; that make abstract concepts clearer.
Concrete materials make concepts real, and therefore easily internalized. Subsequently, your LO can work abstractly (paper and pencil) when he or she has internalized the pattern and no longer needs the concrete learning resource / material.
I’ll show you 3 examples of how I implement this idea in teaching my LOs.
Sounds then Letters
Children are exposed to the spoken words throughout the day. This is a concrete part of their environment: Sounds. They hear people speaking or voices on TV and radio.
When it’s time to begin language learning, we first explore sounds – phonics sounds.
We’ll begin by taking one sound, for example – /d/, and mentioning various words that begin or end in that sound. (You can get a variety of words using our Picture Words Flashcard by ProjectBaby or make your own Flashcards at home using Card stock and colored pens.
The sound “d” will subsequently become very concrete in my LOs mind, at which point we can begin to show, “This is what letter “d” looks like.” For this exercise, you could introduce the Montessori Inspired Alphabet Activity Box by ProjectBaby!
.....and if preferable, using Flashcards.
Finally, after working with this visual representation of a sound for some time, we’ll introduce the abstract: “The name of this sound is D.”
Quantity then Numbers
A number is a symbol that represents a specific quantity, so to make learning numbers more concrete, first introduce your LO to what quantity a number represents. For example, what do 5 sticks look like? What about 5 crayons or 5 books? How do 5 counters look compared to 2 or 4 counters?
Then, when your LO has a concrete understanding of quantity e.g: “5” of any concrete material, you could introduce the symbol that represents that quantity: The number 5.
The use of concrete materials to learn abstract concepts is really helpful for early learning as the materials represent abstract ideas. The materials can be felt and manipulated by your LO so that the hand is always involved in the learning process. This approach to math is logical, clear and extremely effective. It allows young children to internalize math skills by using concrete materials and progressing at their own pace toward abstract concepts.
It enables pre-schoolers to understand and develop a solid foundation in mathematics. Later, as they master the concrete they begin to move to the abstract, where the child begins to solve problems with paper and pencil while still working with (or without) the materials.
Color then Association
Another way of implementing the concept of concrete to abstract is in introducing your LO to colors. More often than not, LOs are introduced to colors by associating a physical object – for example, a red apple - as a sample of what “red” means and looks like, but really, apples aren’t always red. If red is always associated with an apple, what might a child think when they see a green apple? Is it an apple if it’s not red?
For this reason, colors are better presented / taught / introduced in a concrete fashion. The only thing that is different should be the color itself – isolating one difficulty at a time. For instance, by using the Stacking Blocks below, we’ve isolated the different colors in the form of the blocks – without the association of a physical object.
Subsequently, your LO can practice learning the names of colors and matching colors, but in an isolated setting. For that exercise, you may introduce the Memory Card Game by ProjectBaby - it contains 60 cards with 8 different colours and 8 different shapes, and may be used for various sorting activities.
This concrete representation of color can then be applied to anything in the whole world! Like a red apple, a red firetruck or a red ribbon.
What concrete materials do you use in teaching your LO? Do you move from concrete to abstract or Abstract to Concrete? Lets discuss!
Love & Light
Oby O
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