PINK TOWER- MONTESSORI

Sensorial Activities
Pink Tower


Dr. Montessori believed that working with the Sensorial materials enables the children to refine their senses, have a clearer understanding of what they are seeing, feeling, touching or smelling, and helps with the development of intelligence. The Pink Tower is a scientifically designed material in the Sensorial Area of the classroom. She designed this Pink Tower for the age of 3 to 3.5  group children.
Pink Tower consists of 10 wooden cubes, ranging in size from 1 cubic centimetre to 10 cubic centimetres, differing in three dimensions.

PRESENTATION
Have the child carry the cube over to the mat.
carry the top cube by gripping from above the top edges using your right thumb and index finger

Place left hand flat under the cube and carry the cube at waist level.

Then bring the cube to waist level and place your right hand flat on top of the cube.
ACTIVITY
When a child first attempts to build the Pink Tower, they may not be able to do it exactly right, they may not be able to control their movements yet. Through repetition and development of their hand-eye coordination, the child is able to make their hands move in a precise way. This is the key to self-control. When the child masters the skill, they master themself, by mastering their actions.
Using their visual perception, the child can self-assess whether they’ve built the Tower in order. This control of error helps the child realize what’s wrong and correct any mistakes. Through this, the child grows more independent and confident.Once the child has seemed to master the building of the tower, the directress will show him another way of building the Pink Tower.
ADVANTAGES
This simple material could introduce so many different concepts to a child,

The Pink Tower aims to refine a child’s visual sense by discriminating differences in dimension. As a child starts taking each cube to a mat, they can feel the weight and progression of its size. As they build the Tower, they refine their voluntary movement. The child learns self-control by doing the activity precisely and exactly.
Child can learn big and small
Increasing decreasing order
Numbers one to ten
Number names
Backward counting etc.
Preparation for Language and Maths
Indirectly the Pink Tower prepares the child for Language and Maths. It prepares the hand for writing, as children need to use the 3-finger grip to carry the cubes. Through language games, new vocabulary is introduced to the child such as cube, large, small, bigger and biggest. This enables the child to further explore their environment and find something small, large or something “bigger than this”. It also encourages the child to use descriptive language in the environment.

The Pink Tower also prepares the mathematical mind. It indirectly introduces the Decimal System, as the child works with 10 cubes which represents the numbers 1-10. It also introduces Geometry, as the child explores the different cubes and their dimensions.

So, why is the Pink Tower pink?
Dr. Maria Montessori experimented with different colours and she observed that the children were more attracted to the colour pink, compared to the other colours.

“A child who has become master of his acts through long and repeated exercises, and who has been encouraged by the pleasant and interesting activities in which he has been engaged, is a child filled with health and joy and remarkable for his calmness and discipline.” Dr. Maria Montessori, ‘The Discovery of the Child’