5 Senses: Activities

Tasting:

• Identify a variety of different foods while blindfolded.
• Introduce the four main tastes: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Using a representative from each category (we used salt water, sugar water, lemon juice, and vanilla(surprisingly bitter!)) and a q-tip, find the place on your tongue that is most sensitive to each taste. Mark it on a tongue diagram and you've got a personalized tongue map! Here's Gracie's:
  

Smell:

• Identify various scents without using sight. We put different scents (vanilla, vinegar, coffee, mint extract, orange extract, maple extract) onto cotton balls and had Gracie identify them.
• Discover the strong connection between smell and taste by chewing on a few coffee grounds with your nose pinched shut. When you let go of your nose, the coffee taste should become immediately apparent. (We didn't try this one, but it sounds pretty cool!)
  

Touch

• Put together a collection of "touchable" objects (Some examples: sandpaper, cotton balls, fabric, orange peel, lotion, duct tape, ice, marbles, wood). Have a blindfolded student touch objects one at a time and guess what each one is.

Hearing

• Learn that sound is caused by vibration by touching a radio, television, or a drum.
• Experiment in making sound change with a paper towel roll. Does it make it louder or go a certain direction?
• Create a water marimba with several glasses filled to different levels with water. Observe the vibrations in the water as the glass is struck.

Sight

• We have been doing an artist study on Pablo Picasso, so on "Sight" day we looked at some of his paintings, and Gracie worked on her own art project.
• Go on a color scavenger hunt. Make a booklet with half sheets of construction paper in different colors. Try to find something that matches each page. Write down the name of the object or glue the actual object or cut-out magazine picture to the page.
• Some topics to explore with sight: camouflage, sketching of objects, colors/color mixing. i am in art mode right now so that's all I am thinking of! Pretty much any lesson here or here would be great!