In honor of today being Celebration of the Senses, I decided to list some of my favorite 5 senses activities:
Touch
Place objects of various textures (soft, hard, smooth, rough, etc.) inside an empty tissue box one at a time and see if the children can guess what they are simply by touching them. Discuss the textures of each and how they are similar or different.
You can also take this opportunity to review fire safety and how our sense of touch can warn us of danger by touching a door to see if it is hot before opening it in the event of a fire.
Hearing
Tape record different sounds around the house or classroom and see if the children can guess what they are by sound only (car starting, vacuum cleaner, water in the sink, smoke detector, doorbell, dog barking, door closing, classroom bell, toilet flushing-always gets a laugh, etc.)
Read The Listening Walk by Paul Showers then take your class for a listening walk either in the hallway or outside and list all the sounds they hear.
Take this opportunity to discuss deafness and teach the children some simple sign language.
Taste
Have a tasting party and serve various foods with different tastes (sweet, bitter, salty, sour). Show a picture of a tongue and the places on the tongue that detect the various tastes first. Create a graph in which the students choose their favorite taste. Some examples of foods to serve are:
Sweet – chocolate or candy
Bitter – Salt and Vinegar potato chips
Salty – any salty snack such as pretzels
Sour – Lemonheads or lemon pieces
Smell
Fill styrofoam cups with various smells and cover with aluminum foil. Poke some small holes in the foil and allow the children to smell the cups and see if they can guess what is inside by smell only. You can include oranges, bananas, onion, perfume, garlic, vanilla, cinnamon, and liquid smoke or light a match, blow it out and immediately put it in the cup – remind students that if they smell smoke to leave the area and call 911.
Sight
Play the gameI Spy with My Little Eye
Play Color Spy Grades K-3
Color Spy is a variation of the “I Spy” game. Divide players into teams. Write the words “blue”, “red”, “yellow”, “orange” and “green” on separate pieces of paper. Have one member of each team pick a paper. The color picked will be the name of the team.
When someone says “Go,” the teams will have 10 minutes to look around the room for objects that have their team’s color. Teams must make a list of all the objects they find. After the 10 minute search period, the teams come back together and the lists of objects are read. Each team gets one point for each object found. After the lists are read, each team will get five minutes to search the room for colored objects that the other teams did NOT find. For example, if the red team did not find a red apple, another team that DID find the red apple will get one point. The team with the most total points after both searches is the winner.
Creat a safe area of the room where children can not bump into anything dangerous or fall. Blindfold a few children at a time and allow them to maneuver around the area to experience what it would be like without your sense of sight.
