Teaching the Five Senses

From LoveToKnow Home School

Teaching the five senses is a great place to start in elementary science. It makes an ideal unit study for a larger family because while you're teaching the five senses to your younger children, your older children can work on learning the intricate details of how each of the senses work.

Students can explore the science of sound and the ear at the same time.

Teaching the Five Senses

The best way to teach the five senses is to use hands-on activities. Encourage children to state what they already understand about their five senses and build from there. When it comes down to it, they actually already know quite a bit about their five senses and what they do.

Activities for Young Children

Young children will not be able to understand the complexities of the human body and how it communicates to the brain in order to process a message so we understand the world around us. However, they should be able to list the five senses and explain what it is that they do on a most elementary level. In the beginning look for simple opportunities to discuss the five senses, asking questions about how things look, feel, smell, or taste. Simply having your child articulate these feelings is a good beginning in observing how the senses work.

If you and your children like making books, a "Five Senses" book is very easy to put together as a collection of your child's favorite things to see, touch, hear, etc.

Activities for Elementary Children

In addition to being able to identify the five senses and talk about what they do, elementary students should understand in basic terms that the body's senses work by transmitting signals to the brain which the brain then interprets. There are a variety of activities that students can do to help them master these concepts:

How Does Your Sense of Smell Affect Your Sense of Taste

This is a fun experiment although it does take some prep work. To begin, choose several different foods with different types of taste (salty, bitter, sweet, etc.) Use a blender to make each sample the same consistency. (You can also simply choose different types of juices.) Place the samples in small Dixie cups and blind fold your student. Using a clothespin to gently plug the nose, have your child taste each sample and see if they can identify the food or at least the type of taste it is. The sense of smell and the sense of taste are distinctively related and because of that, when you cannot smell properly, you cannot taste properly!

Color Blindness

A model eye is a great high school project.

Color blindness is hereditary and affects significantly more men than it does women. It is caused by a defect to the cones on the retina. Although you are probably aware of whether or not your child is color blind, it still is fun to test and use the test as a spring board for a discussion on the function of rods and cones in the eyes. You can find a color blindness test online or in your pediatrician's office.

Tongue Mapping

Your tongue has five distinctive areas where tastes are more prominent: bitter, salty, sweet and sour. To make a map of your tongue, set up something sweet, something sour, something salty and something bitter. Have your student take a small bite of each and note on the tongue drawing where on his tongue he tastes something the most prominently.

Sometimes kids are not able to distinguish the flavors on their tongue. If this happens, try it again using only two of the distinct flavors such as salty and sweet.

Activities for Middle and High School

Teenagers are able to fully grasp how each of the senses work in intricate detail. This is the time to really delve into all the complexities that rule the five senses.

Models

Building a model of the ear and eye will really help your student understand all of the steps that our brains go through to make sense of the world around us. Have your child use air dry modeling clay to create the model in one sitting. You will find the process to be more effective if you purchase the type of clay that has to be painted allowing your child to paint each of the different aspects of the model. Your students can use toothpicks to label each part of the model before it air dries.

Eye Dissection

A great way to really get hands on is to let your student do a cow's eye dissection. The cow's eye is similar to a human eye and you can learn lots of things by dissecting the eye. You can purchase cow eye dissection kits from places like Home Science Tools. If the thought of using your dining room table to open up a cow eyeball before dinner is less than appealing, you can also try the virtual cow eye dissection offered through the Exploratorium.

Start at the Beginning

The five senses is often one of the first units that children start out with in science. Because it's highly experiential, it's a great way to develop scientific observation skills. However, it doesn't have to be a unit for small children. The human senses are complicated, making the study of the five senses ideal for the entire family to explore together.

Retrieved from "http://home-school.lovetoknow.com/Teaching_the_Five_Senses"