Equipment Design
The equipment set described in this site will work in any teaching environment. It is particularly designed to compliment the Montessori primary equipment set. The two sets share the elements of beauty, simplicity, points of interest, interesting materials, sensory experience, isolation of concept, the use of the hands, control of error, associated language and math and extended lessons. The intention is to provide physical experiences that motivate repetition and create awareness, giving the child the opportunity to develop skills, language and ideas. Physics demonstrations are generally withheld until high school and university on the premise that the student should understand the math before experiencing the physical reality. Well designed physics demonstrations are simple by nature requiring simple actions which means the young child is capable performing them. It is a basic Montessori principle that concrete, sensory experience precede abstraction.
Here are two good examples....
Particles and Waves
Here are two good examples....
Particles and Waves
Sourcing Simplicity Moving Parts Assembly Materials Dexterity
Impressionistic Lessons, Play and Process
Sourcing
While some of this equipment can be made by hand, some has to be manufactured. You can make a primary coil motor, but you have to buy a plasma ball. Possible sources, sellers, are presented throughout this site as a convenience so that if a you are interested you don't have to put in hours of internet searching starting from scratch. However, each piece shown in this site is only one example of how to present a given idea. No single object is the only way to present any one idea. What is important is the experience of the real world that the object gives the child and that the cumulative experiences can be tied together into useful skills and concepts. Whatever is used should be simple, beautiful, easy to obtain and maintain, durable and inexpensive.
Simplicity
Simplicity means the isolation of a phenomenon, ability or idea, the elimination of distraction; no unnecessary sensory aspects, no decoration, no entertainment, no cartoon characters with squeaky voices , no marketing. As an element of design, simplicity asserts that experience can speak to the child for itself. Simplicity asserts that reality is inherently fascinating and that the child does not have to be tricked into exploring it.
Simplicity can be underestimated both in its effect and the difficulty of achieving it.
One of the hardest things about teaching, especially the very young, is remembering what it's like to not know something, literally to have neither the experience nor the words, let alone the ideas; to see, even as an experienced adult, the most basic experiences as fresh and new. Simplicity can be deceptive. The profound can appear to be trivial because the adult remembers always knowing it and so takes it for granted. Like the sensuous, gooey feeling of opposed magnetic fields. This, I believe, is one reason people do not enter early childhood teaching. We become intellectually jaded and mistake the simple for the simplistic and in so doing loose sight of the fantastic.
One goal of presenting simple physical experiences is to help the child the realize that beneath the surprise and fun, beneath the appearance of magic is reality. The natural world really is this interesting. Materials have a primal quality. Energy changes objects. Force fields are all around us. Life is ferocious. Consciousness is causal.
Moving Parts
Montessori equipment set consists of objects that are parts of sets, for instance, the Pink tower is a set of ten cubes each different in size by a factor of ten. These parts are intended to be moved. Manipulation, doing, the use of the hands is fundamental to the method. The cubes can be arranged in any number of patterns but they are not designed to be used to move each other. They are not moving parts in a mechanism. The experience of moving parts, tools, simple machines, fluids and shape-able materials like paper and wire, appears as actual objects in Art and Practical Life, and perhaps as imagery in Cultural lessons. Even then that experience is not identified and developed as such. We tend not to explain that scissors are actually two type one levers (fulcrum in the middle) sharing a single fulcrum and having inclined planes as their cutting edges. Pencils, scissors, awls, tongs, screwdrivers, spoons, whisks, eggbeaters, straws, tubes, the pull string on the window blinds, polishing cream that chemically dissolves tarnish, prisms that spread sunlight, a watering can, the light switches, the toilet handles all can be simply and easily seen as transforming or redirecting Motion, both field and mechanical. Children are profoundly enriched when they acquire appreciation for these objects in their environment. Children are profoundly enriched when they acquire appreciation for these objects in their environment.Children are profoundly empowered when we give them the means to build such things. Building, making, assembling can mean forming raw materials into a new object but also they also mean combing parts to make a mechanism. Take the egg beater apart and put it back together.
Moving parts require the child's respect in handling and the teacher's attention in maintenance. Moving parts get out of tune, like a string on a dulcimer. Moving parts can break.
Children love moving parts; watching, doing, using, taking parts apart and putting them back together.
Children also love being one of the parts, being in the shape, in the machine, in the circuit. When possible, let the child's body be part of what is happening. Point out that her LED shoes will blink when she puts her hand on the plasma ball. Use a wire frame construction set that is as big as she is so she can crawl through them. When a child pushes a machine she is the motive force. When she activates a circuit by connecting it to a power source with her finger she is the switch. When the child operates a device remotely she is the control. A push button switch is, then, more appealing than a slide switch. A push switch only works if you keep pushing it. And if you push it repeatedly, you can make it talk, you can code with it.
Montessori equipment set consists of objects that are parts of sets, for instance, the Pink tower is a set of ten cubes each different in size by a factor of ten. These parts are intended to be moved. Manipulation, doing, the use of the hands is fundamental to the method. The cubes can be arranged in any number of patterns but they are not designed to be used to move each other. They are not moving parts in a mechanism. The experience of moving parts, tools, simple machines, fluids and shape-able materials like paper and wire, appears as actual objects in Art and Practical Life, and perhaps as imagery in Cultural lessons. Even then that experience is not identified and developed as such. We tend not to explain that scissors are actually two type one levers (fulcrum in the middle) sharing a single fulcrum and having inclined planes as their cutting edges. Pencils, scissors, awls, tongs, screwdrivers, spoons, whisks, eggbeaters, straws, tubes, the pull string on the window blinds, polishing cream that chemically dissolves tarnish, prisms that spread sunlight, a watering can, the light switches, the toilet handles all can be simply and easily seen as transforming or redirecting Motion, both field and mechanical. Children are profoundly enriched when they acquire appreciation for these objects in their environment. Children are profoundly enriched when they acquire appreciation for these objects in their environment.Children are profoundly empowered when we give them the means to build such things. Building, making, assembling can mean forming raw materials into a new object but also they also mean combing parts to make a mechanism. Take the egg beater apart and put it back together.
Moving parts require the child's respect in handling and the teacher's attention in maintenance. Moving parts get out of tune, like a string on a dulcimer. Moving parts can break.
Children love moving parts; watching, doing, using, taking parts apart and putting them back together.
Children also love being one of the parts, being in the shape, in the machine, in the circuit. When possible, let the child's body be part of what is happening. Point out that her LED shoes will blink when she puts her hand on the plasma ball. Use a wire frame construction set that is as big as she is so she can crawl through them. When a child pushes a machine she is the motive force. When she activates a circuit by connecting it to a power source with her finger she is the switch. When the child operates a device remotely she is the control. A push button switch is, then, more appealing than a slide switch. A push switch only works if you keep pushing it. And if you push it repeatedly, you can make it talk, you can code with it.
Assembly...and Dis-Assembly
Taking things apart and putting them back together is a fundamental skill, particularly when you attain the ability to generalize the skill, to do it with something you haven't seen before. Doing it with the help an image and producing an image from what you've built is are engineering skills. Two examples in this curriculum of building from images are wire frame building sets and circuit building sets.
Nested boxes are an easy example of an assembly consisting of non-moving parts. Once you have them put together that's it. They just sit there and don't do anything. The parts are not moving parts that combine to be a whole new object with behaviors the individual parts themselves do not have. On the other hand, consider a hand cranked pencil sharpener, a common classroom object and which, depending on the model, has about ten parts that can be taken apart with a screw driver. The child will find in a pencil sharpener levers, gears, screws and cutting edges. Whether or not something works after you put it back together is the control of error. The classroom management rule of the process is that you have to take it apart, you can't break it apart. Its a puzzle. Someone put it together and now you have to do it backwards. It's reverse engineering.
Taking things apart and putting them back together is a fundamental skill, particularly when you attain the ability to generalize the skill, to do it with something you haven't seen before. Doing it with the help an image and producing an image from what you've built is are engineering skills. Two examples in this curriculum of building from images are wire frame building sets and circuit building sets.
Nested boxes are an easy example of an assembly consisting of non-moving parts. Once you have them put together that's it. They just sit there and don't do anything. The parts are not moving parts that combine to be a whole new object with behaviors the individual parts themselves do not have. On the other hand, consider a hand cranked pencil sharpener, a common classroom object and which, depending on the model, has about ten parts that can be taken apart with a screw driver. The child will find in a pencil sharpener levers, gears, screws and cutting edges. Whether or not something works after you put it back together is the control of error. The classroom management rule of the process is that you have to take it apart, you can't break it apart. Its a puzzle. Someone put it together and now you have to do it backwards. It's reverse engineering.
Materials
Commercially objects with moving parts for children tend to be produced in plastic rather than wood and metal and glass. When plastic is the right material for the job its right and can be quite beautiful. Still, a balance between natural materials and synthetics needs to be created and the difference between the two categories talked about and explained. It is also important that the child appreciate materials as vulnerable, breakable. Respect for the environment begins in understanding that it can be damaged.
Material selection and equipment design also offer primary experience in a fundamental aspect of physics and the associated language. Material selection provides the child an awareness of the elements and so the Period Table which, incidentally, is an image that should be on the wall in every primary classroom next to the image of the Solar System. We can easily give the child copper (Cu), aluminum (Al), silver (Ag), iron (Fe), oxygen (O), hydrogen (H), carbon (C), silicon (Si) and more in concrete identifiable forms which then leads to combinations of elements into combinations like steel, glass, plastic, water and and living tissue like paper and wood. The materials we choose also give us the opportunity to present the four states of matter which are solid, liquid, gas and the one that is commonly ignored even though it resides in every fluorescent light in every classroom, plasma.
Commercially objects with moving parts for children tend to be produced in plastic rather than wood and metal and glass. When plastic is the right material for the job its right and can be quite beautiful. Still, a balance between natural materials and synthetics needs to be created and the difference between the two categories talked about and explained. It is also important that the child appreciate materials as vulnerable, breakable. Respect for the environment begins in understanding that it can be damaged.
Material selection and equipment design also offer primary experience in a fundamental aspect of physics and the associated language. Material selection provides the child an awareness of the elements and so the Period Table which, incidentally, is an image that should be on the wall in every primary classroom next to the image of the Solar System. We can easily give the child copper (Cu), aluminum (Al), silver (Ag), iron (Fe), oxygen (O), hydrogen (H), carbon (C), silicon (Si) and more in concrete identifiable forms which then leads to combinations of elements into combinations like steel, glass, plastic, water and and living tissue like paper and wood. The materials we choose also give us the opportunity to present the four states of matter which are solid, liquid, gas and the one that is commonly ignored even though it resides in every fluorescent light in every classroom, plasma.
Dexterity
If the senses inform the child's mind, her hands build it.
The beauty of moving parts is that they first require and then become tools. The inherent limitation of digital devices is that they reduce the use of the hands to a bare minimum. Touch screens, keyboards, mice require small movements and little strength. Game controllers and texting require complex coordination but do not teach the child size and shape, texture, weight and temperature and strong physical interaction. They give the child a degree of control but do not integrate her into the phenomenon. The presentation of technology in the primary classroom requires a physical, mechanical medium.
If the senses inform the child's mind, her hands build it.
The beauty of moving parts is that they first require and then become tools. The inherent limitation of digital devices is that they reduce the use of the hands to a bare minimum. Touch screens, keyboards, mice require small movements and little strength. Game controllers and texting require complex coordination but do not teach the child size and shape, texture, weight and temperature and strong physical interaction. They give the child a degree of control but do not integrate her into the phenomenon. The presentation of technology in the primary classroom requires a physical, mechanical medium.
Experience, Play and Process
The realization of Energy begins with impressionistic lessons, meaning you provide the child the basic experience and let her play with it, explore it. Turn the plasma ball on and touch it. Then turn it off. On/Off, incidentally, is a fundamental practical process which actually takes years to remember consistently and to understand. The child is not born knowing this. It is sensory experience and an ordered action experience, but not yet sort and match work or the accomplishment of a practical task. Spin a gyroscope and have the child pick it up and try to turn it over. Vivid experience of an energy/force that can't be seen and will eventually keep the child on her bicycle but all you do, at first, is pick it up and turn it over. Of course you have to do it without getting your fingers on the wheel and stopping it. So there's a control of error even in a simple pre-process action. The first use of equipment is there to make the energy as such apparent to the senses so create the opportunity for the associated language. The banana hook makes a magnetic field readily apparent and is fun to use. The static tube does the same for an electric field.
Impressionistic lessons literally put the child into the experience. A plasma ball presents flowing Electricity. Touch it. Guide it with your finger or your nose or your toes. The idea is to make the child a part of the experience, to put the child into the phenomenon, mechanism or circuit and give her not only the experience but the sense of control. Any tool or control interface offers this, any switch, any measuring device and any well chosen toy. Point out to the child that her shoes that blink when she walks also light up when she touches the plasma ball. As she does so repeatedly she not only uses a switch, she is the switch. Her body is literally a part of the circuit. Children love being in the circuit the way they love moving parts. They want to be one of the moving parts. This is important because it is delightful and a basic goal of equipment design is, after all, that the child want to do it. Impressionistic lessons are play. They're fun.
The step from impressionistic experience to deliberate interaction and process is taken by giving the child tools. These tools can be for direct interaction and control or they can be for observation, measurement and recording. A primary child can see detail with a lens. A primary child can record in symbols, drawings, models, digital images and audio recordings. A primary child can measure space in three dimensions. She can measure time, heat, sound, chemical concentration and electromagnetic fields. The child can use an infrared thermometer, a microphone, a battery checker, an ac sensor, a compass and heat and magnetically sensitive films. The child can use a radio. She can tune in the stations, given an analogue dial. She can see the station numbers, in two bands, AM and FM. Measurement is the use of probes, testers and sensors. Measurement is counting. The relationships between things counted is the math of physics. Speed is a combination of distance and time. Eventually she will understand that speed = distance/time. An AC circuit tester beeps and flashes in the immediate presence of a changing electrical field like the one around a plasma ball. It beeps and flashes faster as it approaches the ball. Move away, it stops. Hold it far enough away that it stops and then put your other hand on the plasma ball. The sensor beeps and flashes and you are inside the electrical field. The beeping changes pitch indicating the presence and intensity of the field. The changing pitch can be used as musical notes, which offers the possibility of playing and singing.
Presenting Energy through the use of tools, as opposed to entertainment, is important because the child needs not only an experience but also a way to do something with it. Equipment should place the child in an active rather than passive role. Compare a static tube with a balloon example of static electricity. Rub the balloon and stick it to a vertical surface. Entertaining but over. You've done it. It is not something you're doing. It is not an ongoing interaction. It terms of classroom management it actually leaves a void of activity which can rapidly fill with negative silliness. A static tube, which is a piece of pvc tubing charged by rubbing the wool on the plastic and then using the tube to move, interact with various objects without touching them. These objects can be hanging from strings, balancing on points, poking out of a kleenex box and even water streaming from a faucet. The static tube is a wand, an extension of the child's hand directing an invisible field. It develops focus and dexterity. It informs the mind. It is creative.
The underlying design concept is that of placing the child in the circuit, in the mechanism.
The realization of Energy begins with impressionistic lessons, meaning you provide the child the basic experience and let her play with it, explore it. Turn the plasma ball on and touch it. Then turn it off. On/Off, incidentally, is a fundamental practical process which actually takes years to remember consistently and to understand. The child is not born knowing this. It is sensory experience and an ordered action experience, but not yet sort and match work or the accomplishment of a practical task. Spin a gyroscope and have the child pick it up and try to turn it over. Vivid experience of an energy/force that can't be seen and will eventually keep the child on her bicycle but all you do, at first, is pick it up and turn it over. Of course you have to do it without getting your fingers on the wheel and stopping it. So there's a control of error even in a simple pre-process action. The first use of equipment is there to make the energy as such apparent to the senses so create the opportunity for the associated language. The banana hook makes a magnetic field readily apparent and is fun to use. The static tube does the same for an electric field.
Impressionistic lessons literally put the child into the experience. A plasma ball presents flowing Electricity. Touch it. Guide it with your finger or your nose or your toes. The idea is to make the child a part of the experience, to put the child into the phenomenon, mechanism or circuit and give her not only the experience but the sense of control. Any tool or control interface offers this, any switch, any measuring device and any well chosen toy. Point out to the child that her shoes that blink when she walks also light up when she touches the plasma ball. As she does so repeatedly she not only uses a switch, she is the switch. Her body is literally a part of the circuit. Children love being in the circuit the way they love moving parts. They want to be one of the moving parts. This is important because it is delightful and a basic goal of equipment design is, after all, that the child want to do it. Impressionistic lessons are play. They're fun.
The step from impressionistic experience to deliberate interaction and process is taken by giving the child tools. These tools can be for direct interaction and control or they can be for observation, measurement and recording. A primary child can see detail with a lens. A primary child can record in symbols, drawings, models, digital images and audio recordings. A primary child can measure space in three dimensions. She can measure time, heat, sound, chemical concentration and electromagnetic fields. The child can use an infrared thermometer, a microphone, a battery checker, an ac sensor, a compass and heat and magnetically sensitive films. The child can use a radio. She can tune in the stations, given an analogue dial. She can see the station numbers, in two bands, AM and FM. Measurement is the use of probes, testers and sensors. Measurement is counting. The relationships between things counted is the math of physics. Speed is a combination of distance and time. Eventually she will understand that speed = distance/time. An AC circuit tester beeps and flashes in the immediate presence of a changing electrical field like the one around a plasma ball. It beeps and flashes faster as it approaches the ball. Move away, it stops. Hold it far enough away that it stops and then put your other hand on the plasma ball. The sensor beeps and flashes and you are inside the electrical field. The beeping changes pitch indicating the presence and intensity of the field. The changing pitch can be used as musical notes, which offers the possibility of playing and singing.
Presenting Energy through the use of tools, as opposed to entertainment, is important because the child needs not only an experience but also a way to do something with it. Equipment should place the child in an active rather than passive role. Compare a static tube with a balloon example of static electricity. Rub the balloon and stick it to a vertical surface. Entertaining but over. You've done it. It is not something you're doing. It is not an ongoing interaction. It terms of classroom management it actually leaves a void of activity which can rapidly fill with negative silliness. A static tube, which is a piece of pvc tubing charged by rubbing the wool on the plastic and then using the tube to move, interact with various objects without touching them. These objects can be hanging from strings, balancing on points, poking out of a kleenex box and even water streaming from a faucet. The static tube is a wand, an extension of the child's hand directing an invisible field. It develops focus and dexterity. It informs the mind. It is creative.
The underlying design concept is that of placing the child in the circuit, in the mechanism.