Materials Spotlight: The Geometry Cabinet

Nestled on a shelf in Montessori primary classrooms you’ll find a small wooden cabinet with six to seven slim drawers. It may not look like much from the outside. Even when you slide out one of the drawers, you’ll just see six wooden square divisions each with a wooden inset with a small knob in the center. As you continue to pull out the different drawers, you’ll discover that each wooden inset is a series of geometric shapes: circles that vary in diameter, rectangles with the same height but varying in width up to the square, different triangles, regular polygons, quadrilaterals, and curved figures. 

This is the Geometry Cabinet, an important and well-used material in Montessori primary (and elementary) classrooms. With a multitude of uses, this material serves to help children not only enhance their visual and muscular memory, it also provides a foundation for advanced geometry work as well as preparing children’s hands for writing.