Young children experience the world as a jumble of disconnected impressions. Modern children confront the added disorientation of manufactured reality in TV, video and other sense assaulting imagery. The immature brain struggles to sort the world outside the self into sensible groups of things that share common characteristics. These early steps toward understanding categories are the necessary beginnings of thinking. They are the child's hard work. They require intense uninterrupted concentration.

In this area of particular sense stimuli, the overload of too much, all at once, is removed. Here the child is free to explore one sense at a time; to concentrate on the subtle nuances of shapes and sizes, colors, textures, and aromas; to sample and sort varieties of sounds, loud, soft, jarring and pleasant, Here all the senses are exercised and honed. Bell tones are matched and sounded up and down the musical scale. The carefully designed objects and materials in this section present fascinating puzzles of similarities and differences solved by seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, sorting, matching, and comparing.

Children's inner drive to know their world pushes them to find inherently logical connections among groups of things. All these sensorial materials are designed with an inherently logical order magnified by color coding and other clues that become clear as the child uses them. This refining of the senses provides a concrete base for the intellectual development of abstract reasoning. The discoveries that result from the conscious ordering of sense impressions lead the body, brain and mind to the beginnings of independent thinking and the triumphs of intelligent conclusions.