Learning with the Senses: Our Early Years Garden Opens

The best classroom is the one with soil under its fingernails.

This term our early years pupils took their Sensorial Albums outside. In the school garden they compared each material to the real thing — the texture of bark, the shape of a leaf, the weight of a seed — and presented their findings to their peers with their own hand-written cards.

In Montessori education the senses are the doorway to the mind. Before a child writes the word "flower", they have held flowers. Before they read about an oasis, they have watched water move through sand. The garden extends the prepared environment beyond the walls of the classroom, and it is open to every pupil on our morning outdoor cycle.