Montessori Sunday: Color Tablets

Welcome back to another Montessori Sunday, the educational part of the blog. Come on, I'm a teacher, there has to be more on here than just cute stories! Today I want to talk about the color tablets since they've been mentioned quite a bit on the blog lately.

The color tablets are part of the sensorial area in the classroom, specifically the sense of vision. I want to remind readers that the point of the sensorial materials is to teach children to refine their use of the senses. The materials isolate one property of the world (color in this case) so that is easier for the child to grasp the concept. Think about it this way, telling a child "this pencil is blue, and so the rug, and the sky, and this piece of paper. They are all blue." can be confusing as is might be difficult to notice what these various objects all have in common. With the color tablets everything is the same except for the color of the tablet, so it is easy for the child to differentiate.

There are actually 3 separate boxes of color tablets. Box 1 has pairs of the three primary colors: red, blue and yellow. Most children come in already knowing the language for colors and so they begin with the next box. Color box 2 also has pairs of tablets but has even more colors. This box is first presented as a simple matching activity which can be extended to matching at a distance, or matching with objects in the environment. The child is shown how to handle the tablets by the edges so as to not mar the colored part with fingerprints.

Color box 3 is the most complex and has an impressive 63 tablets in it. Unlike the first two boxes, the tablets are not paired, but rather graded. Each color has a progression of dark to light and the child is introduced to the idea of grading by the shade of the tablets. This is done first with just a single color at a time and the child works up to doing multiple colors. As a culminating event the child is shown how to make the 'sunburst'. The sunburst involves grading all the color tablets around a centralized object (usually a globe). I can say from personal experience that it is a daunting task to sort out and grade that many tablets. The children love the finished product though and it's pretty common to see them working in pairs to complete the sunburst.