Five Senses

We are four fifths of the way through our five senses unit (we have smell left to do).  I used DeeDee Wills five senses mini unit as inspiration for our activities, and it worked out awesome!  We also did some other small activities and we did it as part of a Monster theme (which the kids absolutely LOOOVED!)  We are still working on pictures of our class monster book and we made a big classroom monster and labelled the monster senses. (They also wrote about what they thought the monster would do with his senses.  It was so funny - like the monster needed a nose to smell his stinky feet and ears to hear dogs.  Apparently  monsters are afraid of dogs.)  I will grab some pics of those things tomorrow, if we get the book finished up.

Here are some pics of a few of the activities we have done so far:

TOUCH:

I set up four stations around the room with six objects on each table.  There were at least two items on each table that could match the following descriptions: hard, soft, smooth, rough, scratchy, or fuzzy.  Students worked in groups and rotated through the stations to match the items with their description.  We used the recording sheet from DeeDee Wills unit after we had touched all of the items. 

HEARING:

We again used an idea from the mini unit, but since it was close to easter, I decided to "hide" the sounds in easter eggs.  The students thought this was the grandest thing ever - sometimes its the simplest things!  They just loved shaking them all and trying to distinguish which ones were matching.  They did awesome with it.  I thought a few would be tricky, but they nailed it.

SIGHT:

We looked at small things like coins, leaves, rocks, sticks, and our fingerprints under a magnifying glass and looked for details that we couldn't see without the magnifying glass.  They found the coins the most interesting, because they could see dots and ridges around the edges that they didn't see before.

TASTE:

We had a taste test to learn about the differences between sweet, salty, and sour.  Here are the items we tested: icing, lemon, sour fizz candy, tortillas, pink popcorn, and regular popcorn.  It was interesting to note a couple of misconceptions they had - I started by asking for guesses about what would be sweet and of course everyone guessed the candy.  You should have seen their faces when they popped it in their mouths!!!  Also, they tasted the regular popcorn and it was salty so they assumed the pink popcorn was salty too - candy popcorn is not that popular here so not many had tried it before.  They were surprised to find out it was sweet, and they all fell in love with it!

  

OTHER ACTIVITIES:

We also did a few quick activities that my K collegue gave us, which came in super handy when I was away taking care of my daughter while she was sick.  I find it so hard to find decent sub activities.  The beauty of these was not the work the students did to complete them, because they are relatively simple, but they brought about great discussions about how we do not use senses in isolation (they pointed out that we can see most of the things we hear) and the safety issues concerned with hot and cold, which is part of our safety curriculum.  I asked what sense we would use if we saw a pot of water on the stove and we wanted to know if it was hot or cold, and we discussed what other senses we could use to figure it out.