Our Five Senses

Hello everyone!

I was really nervous about teaching science and social studies when I started this year! So I decided the best unit to start my year with for science is to review the five senses. The kids have been having so much fun! We started our with reading The Magic School Bus: Explores the Senses by Joanna Cole. This just introduced us to the five senses and gave us a little more detail as to how each of our senses work within our body. It was a little over their heads, but they were very interested!

First, we studied our sense of sight, and what it is like not to have it anymore! I blindfolded each of the kids and gave them a classroom item that they had to identify using other senses. They flew through this so fast I had to scramble to find random items for them to try to identify!

Next, we explored our sense of touch. We made an anchor chart of all the "describing" words that we could think of. We came up with words like: fuzzy, hard, soft, flat, bumpy, ect. The next day, I made up a chart for the students to go on a scavenger hunt around the room. Their scavenger hunt was to find different items in the room that felt the same as their describing word. I think my favorite response was "round" for the doorknob. How creative!

Then, we did our sense of hearing. I went on Youtube and found a bunch of different random sounds...some easy and some hard. They were things like a baby crying, door slamming, a sneeze, the ocean, a helicopter, a motorcycle, ect. I played each sound a few times and the kids had too draw a picture and write what it is they saw. They LOVED this! They were so excited to hear the answers at the end. None of them got the door slamming though. However for that sound I got a rock falling, a car crash, a toilet lid slamming down, and a dog barking? What were they hearing?

All of these activities were awesome for my really academically diverse class, because it was so easy to differentiate. Some of my kids could absolutely do words and pictures, but the students that could only do pictures were still expected to provide a clear answer.

Next, we worked on our sense of smell. This one was probably the funniest one to watch. I made "smelling jars" aka cups with different foods and such in them covered with tissues (really high tech, I know) and gave each of the students a response sheet in which they had to match the given smell to the number on the cup. I did toothpaste, garlic powder, peanut butter, vanilla, etc. I was realy surprised how fast and how accurate they were! Way to go firsties!

Last, of course, is our sense of taste. I will update on this at the end of the week when we use our sense of taste when making our own applesauce :)

Yay for our five senses!

Sarah