What is the difference between a group and a material?

When customizing your lessons, you may have noticed that you have the option to make a "group" into a "material" and wondered what the difference was. I'm here to help!

The easiest way to explain it is that a group is a way to organize lessons, while a material is the actual thing the child takes off the shelf to work with. 

An example could be in the 3-6 lesson set there is an area called Sensorial, under that area there is a group called "Visual", under that group there are 6 materials: the cylinder blocks, the pink tower, brown stair, red rods, color tablets, and the geometry cabinet. Each material has a certain number of lessons listed underneath it - the lessons that the teacher would give to the child with that material.

Additionally, with materials, you can search for the material when you type # on the activity page or lesson plan. When you type #pinktower for example, you'll see a list of lessons like this:

The material becomes the main tag followed by the specific lesson. You cannot search for groups in this manner. If I typed #visual, nothing would come up. However, if you look closely at the screenshot, you will see that next to each material:lesson combination there is a light grey "in Visual". So, the system tells you which group that material:lesson belongs to.