Have you tried any blindfold activities with your child? If your child goes to a Montessori school, it’s likely they have tried some sensorial activities like the pink tower, knobbed cylinders, thermic tablets, perhaps even the trinomial, binomial cubes or roman arch while wearing a blindfold.
What is the point? Wearing a blindfold takes away the child’s sense of sight, and therefore the child needs to rely their other senses especially touch. Wearing a blindfold helps the child to develop their stereognostic sense. When using their stereognostic sense the child creates a mental picture through touch; as the child feels the sandpaper letter s, they form a picture of the s in their mind.
Using a blindfold is a great extension activity to many of the Montessori sensorial materials, but what about at home? How can we use a blindfold to develop the stereognostic sense at home?
Here are six blindfold activities we’ve used recently!
Sandpaper letters. Using a blindfold with sandpaper letters helps to strengthen the child’s knowledge of and familiarity with how the letters are formed.
I use this only when the child is familiar with each letter and the name of each letter.
This activity was actually Otto’s idea when he saw it pictured on the side of a box of some sandpaper letters, so he was super excited to give it a try.
Sandpaper numbers. We can also try using a blindfold with sandpaper numbers. We have a set of sandpaper numbers, but the Montessori Work books are fun to use, too like Letter Work, Number Work, Shape Work or any other tactile books you have at home.
Geometric solids. If your child already knows the name of the geometric solids, we can use them with the blindfold.
We can ask the child how many sides does the solid have, and how many edges or corners are there?
This is one of my favourite activities with a blindfold. It is more challenging but also satisfying for the child when they take the blindfold off and look at the shape they’ve been holding.
Model animals. This activity was the most fun!! I didn’t let my child see the animals first, I had them covered by a tea towel, so when he went to feel the animals with the blindfold on, he had no idea what they were.
This was easy to set up because we have a lot of model animals at home. Otto only guessed the shark correctly. He thought the frog was an octopus and had no idea what the butterfly was.
With the animals, we can ask how many legs does it have, is it long or thin, does it have ears or a tail?
We can also set up a similar tray with other household objects like a peg, spoon, keys.
Playdough. I wasn’t sure how this would go but knew it would be fun.
Otto made some fun shapes but, most of all, just enjoyed kneading and playing with the playdough in his hands.
Balancing rocks. If these are too complex for the child, we could also use usual blocks or stacking cubes (like the pink tower).
Here Otto is using the Patience Pebbles c/o Mindful and Co Kids. This was challenging!
We also tried wearing a blindfold while drawing!
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