Refining the Senses in Paper Folding Activities

Extension Exercises for the Montessori Preschool Sensorial Apparatus

Sep 23, 2009

The young child who has been introduced to folding can find many opportunities to apply the newly learnt skill in the Montessori Sensorial activities.

In a Montessori preschool classroom, folding is introduced and developed through a series of carefully graded practical life exercises. Children also practise folding in their daily preschool life. During mealtimes, for example, they fold and unfold table napkins and table cloths. They fold wash cloths when they wipe up spills or clean up tables after an art activity. They also fold wash cloths that are laundered and dried.

In addition, children appreciate their folding skill when they use it to support their learning in other curriculum areas, for example in the area of sensorial education. Paper folding is in fact a sensorial craft and many activities can be designed to allow young children to practise folding while engaging their senses.

Paper Folding Offers Tactile Experiences

For children who have worked with the Montessori touch boards and touch tablets, their tactile sense can be engaged as they fold, for example, paper of different textures. Whether foil or waxy, glossy or matt, corrugated or embossed, crinkled or wrinkled, these sheets when folded offer the young child a range of tactile pleasures. These folded sheets can also be used in a tactile pairing exercise as well. Children close their eyes and put together the folded sheets that feel the same to them.

Paper Folding Stimulates the Baric Sense

When children are given paper of different thickness to fold, the baric sense is naturally triggered as children are sensitive to the slight weight differences of these sheets. Children who have worked with the Montessori baric tablets are able to distinguish weight differences as small as 6-10 grams. They will easily be able to discriminate the differences in weight between the 70 gram and 80 gram sheets, for example.

Paper Folding Engages the Visual Sense

The colours and designs on the paper offer visual delight to the young child. There is also visual refinement of shape and size in paper folding. Children can fold paper and name or describe the shape produced. Another more challenging activity is to fold the paper, snip off a corner and guess what shape is produced when the sheet is unfolded. Origami, of course, is an excellent paper folding project that allows for shape exploration.

Children familiar with the Montessori constructive triangles can draw and cut out paper in the shape of the equilateral triangle, hexagon, parallelogram, trapezium and rhombus. They then are challenged to fold these into triangles, reinforcing the lesson of the constructive triangles – that plane geometric figures can be constructed from triangles. This folding exercise also challenges them to find the lines of symmetry for the given shapes.

The Montessori exercises in visual discrimination can also be extended using paper models. For example, a child who enjoys folding can be encouraged to create a paper pink tower, as follows:

This activity further reinforces the properties of the cube, namely the number of faces, edges and vertices. There are ten paper cubes to be made, varying in size from one cubic centimeter to one cubic decimeter. Visual and muscular knowledge of dimension is clearly exercised.

Paper Folding and Auditory Activities

Even the auditory sense can be used in conjunction with a folding activity. A popular Montessori material for the developing the sense of hearing is the Sound Boxes. In this activity, children shake cylinders and pair those that sound the same, and move on to grade them from loudest to softest.

Children can make their own sound shakers as well to play this sound pairing or grading game. They fold paper into tiny squares and place them into small identical opaque containers (such as black film canisters) for them to shake, pair and grade accordingly.

Paper Folding and the Olfactory Sense

The olfactory sense can be stimulated when children are given scented paper for their folding activities. In another exercise, they fold paper boxes and into each of these, they place items from the environment to create scent boxes. They may collect for their boxes flower petals or screw pine leaves from the garden or peels of citrus fruits (dried) from kitchen activities.

In short, children are encouraged to use their folding skills when their senses are engaged in the folding activities.

The copyright of the article Refining the Senses in Paper Folding Activities in Lesson Plans & Materials is owned by Carolyn Marie Choo. Permission to republish Refining the Senses in Paper Folding Activities in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.