Children learn through their sense. They like to touch, smell, even taste things. The Montessori method encourages this natural inclination by providing materials that educate through the senses and help the child to learn to distinguish colors, shapes, textures, and sounds. The child is introduced to concepts such as thick and thin, long and short, smallest and largest. He learns the shapes and names of objects such as the sphere, cube, prism, etc. which will later be used in math and geometry.
Pictured above (left to right, top to bottom) are Touch Tablets, the Pink Tower, Broad Prisms (or Brown Stair), Red Rods, Color Tabs (closed boxes), Geometric Cabinet, various (lidded) boxes of Constructive Triangles, and the Geometric Solids.