Last week the children have been learning all about our 5 senses: Smell, Taste, Sight, Touch & Hearing.
Our perception of the outside world depends heavily on our five senses; sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. It is our first line of defence and enables us to interpret and react to everyday activities. As such, they are a great vehicle for children to learn more about the world around them and for them to start to understand how their body works.
For sense of smell, the children did smelly painting. This entailed painting a picture of the 5 senses using different spices/seasonings mixed with water. The ones we used were garlic, ginger, cinnamon and curry powder. The children smelt these first to see if they could guess the smell, but none did. However, their favourite smell overall was the ginger. We hope you all enjoyed the ‘delightful’ smells that filled your car/home from the artwork they had worked so hard on and now has pride of place on the fridge!!
For sense of taste, the children all took part in a taste test, with the aim of testing our sweet, sour, bitter and salty tastebuds via dark chocolate, lemon, cookies and pretzels. The children all tried the food as mentioned above, then they were asked if they thought the food tasted salty (pretzels), sour (lemon), bitter (dark chocolate) or sweet (cookie); this was repeated with each food. They were then told which food belonged to which group. They were asked if they liked the taste of the food, unsurprisingly, most of the children didn’t like the lemon, but they all loved the cookies. Surprisingly, they all liked the dark chocolate and thought it was sweet even though it was supposed to be bitter. A couple of children said they did like the taste of certain foods, even though they didn’t think they would off beforehand. The children were all adventurous trying the different tastes.
For sense of touch, the children took part in a sensory touch. Eight cards, each with a different texture, such as, cotton wool, sandpaper, rice, feathers, felt, granola, lollipop sticks, and straws were placed on the table for the children to touch and feel the different textures. They all loved touching the card with the cotton wool and one child said, “it was like touching a cloud”.
For sense of sound, the children explored musical instruments and created different sounds with them, and they all followed instructions to make quiet and loud sounds with them.
For sense of sight, the children were given homemade I-Spy/sensory bottles; basically, plastic bottles containing blue/white rice with numbers and eyes mixed within. The children had to use their eyes to try to find and identify the numbers inside the bottle.
By the end of the week, the children had all learnt that we use our eyes to see, our nose to smell, our ears to hear, our hands to touch and our mouths to taste!
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