Five Senses Nature Walk

In searching for new activities for teaching the five senses, I stumbled upon this pack of free activities which included a nature walk recording form.  Being one that loves the outdoors, I was super excited to share this lesson with the kiddos.  

I had a loose idea of where we'd go on our nature walk, but was pleasantly surprised to find this as we kept walking:

I mean, really. Are you kidding me? We have an outdoor classroom and I didn't even know it! (This also shows you how much fenced-in property the school has, if we have all this and I had no idea.) We will certainly be using this in the future. We can write outside! Read outside! And obviously, explore outside!

Just look at those little scientists go!

And everyone is so happy!

Our Five Senses

This week we started our unit on the Five Senses!  I love teaching the senses.

On Monday, we learned a little bit about sharks while exploring our sense of sight. We saw pictures of sharks in books and saw a shark tooth with and without a magnifying glass.  As we looked under the mangifying glass, we noticed some sharp, ragged edges and some cracks in the teeth!

On Tuesday, we focused on our sense of sound.  We listened to various audio clips from this site.  We had to try to figure out what we were hearing just by listening. We were pretty good at it! Some of them tricked us, like the train bell and the steamboat whistle.


Yesterday we explored our sense of touch.  We glued something soft, scratchy, fuzzy, rough, smooth and hard to our paper so we could feel the various textures.  Then we drew a picture of something we knew felt the same way. 'Scratchy' was hard for us, until I remembered... beards are scratchy! Haha. Many of the kiddos could relate. :)

We also made our Mr. Potato Head craft in the morning to review all five senses.  As we added the parts to Mr. Potato Head, we wrote which sense we can experience with each body part.

Today we highlighted our sense of smell.  I prepared some bags with some scent-soaked cotton balls. Students got to take a whiff of each scent and decide which one was their favorite.

The scents I used were: (1) BBQ, (2) Garlic, (3) Soap, (4) Perfume, (5) Cinnamon and (6) Basil.

Students were pretty grossed out by the look of the basil soaked
cotton ball, but I told them to focus on the smell... it ended up being
their favorite scent!

In order from our most favorite to least favorite: Basil, Cinnamon, Perfume, BBQ, Garlic, Soap.

Surprisingly, even though the soap smelled pretty good in my opinion, a lot of the kids said "EW! Soap!" after smelling it. Haha.

That leaves one sense left... taste! Just in time for our sorting activity with shape snacks tomorrow. 

Don't forget TOMORROW IS AN EARLY RELEASE DAY!!!!

As always, owl be teaching you tomorrow!