Montessori Knobless Cylinders Sequencing

Vito is 39 months old.

Vito and I have been working on Knobless Cylinders a lot lately and many have asked what this  Montessori sensorial materials can basically do and how can they use it at home.  Though I’ve talked about this before, I realized that I didn’t really explained the method that I’m using, how to use it in the beginning and how to extend the use of the materials once the child has mastered the basics.  So I’m starting a series of post on Montessori Knobless Cylinders ,  from the basics to the extension activities. 

Montessori Knobless Cylinders are a set of Montessori sensorial materials for visual discrimination (fine differences in dimensions) , exposure to the process of putting things in a series (seriation)  or grading by size, vocabulary words like large, larger, largest (small, smaller or smallest), hand-eye coordination, concentration and more.

This comes in 4 sets, with 10 cylinders each and in specific colors:

• RED, diameter decreases while the height remains constant
• BLUE: height decreases while the diameter remains constant
• YELLOW:  height and diameter decreases
• GREEN:  diameter decreases while the height increases

Now, on how to present the materials, this site provides the step by step instruction.  Since I am not Montessori trained (just the usual homeschooler adapting Montessori at home), I learn through online tutorials, reading online albums and of course from other mommy Montessori bloggers.  It’s up to you if you want to follow the steps word by word, but in our case, I usually tweak and adapt the procedure based on my child’s current mood and behavior. 

Anyway, the first step I took was to introduce each set.  You can read about it here.  We started grading the cylinders one set at time.   Since all of these are new to Vito, I used a guide in creating the sequence.  You can get it from Montessori Print Shop for less than a dollar and had to be printed in LEGAL sized paper. 

Always start from the largest cylinder and work from left to right (for reading). 

You can watch our video on how Vito worked on these cylinders here.  Note that working on all 4 sets is too much for a young child.  Here Vito wanted to work on all 4 sets, but when we reached the green and yellow, he started to get tired though he doesn’t want to stop.  So to give him a little bit of motivation, I told him that we’ll take turns in completing the sequence.  He actually enjoyed that we were doing it together! 

Over and over we practised this, learning about dimension and sizes, exploring which is large, larger and largest or small, smaller, smallest.  My boy would always call the cylinders as “stairs”.  Once the child has practised the seriation and grading, you can move on by working without the guides. 

Another variation of the work is to build a tower. Of course, you always start with the biggest/thickest working your way up to the smallest/thinnest.  This is by far Vito’s favourite! I think every child loves to stack things together and build a tower. We’ve done this activity a lot of times, he was glued in forming the the tower even doing it without my assistance.   These days, he’s been so playful that he wanted to stack the cylinders in different sizes so they can all fall down (he thinks this is fun!). You need  to watch the video so you can see Vito looking up at me for approval whenever he tries to form the tower and there were times that I need to instruct him on what to do (he would insist on doing a  different thing). 

And that’s it!  These are the basics of the Montessori Knobless Cylinders and as we practise more, we’ll move on to some extension activities (you can get more inspirations here). 

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