The Five Senses by Christine

(Posting this VERY late!)

Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling...These senses help our toddlers (and now bigger kids!) make sense of their worlds. Today's session turned our kids into little scientists as they experimented with the world around them.

We first started with a song to welcome everyone (Sung to, "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star):

Let's see who is here today.
Who has come to join our play?
Everyone sit close at hand.
Say your name, then you can stand.
Let's see who is here today.
Who has come to join our play?

Christine then gave a short explanation of each of the five senses using another song sung to the tune of "Where is Thumbkin?")

Five senses. Five senses.
We have them. We have them.
Seeing, hearing, touching,
Tasting and smelling.
There are five. There are five. 

Then Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head were brought out to let the kids get acquainted with their five senses. Some of the results were definitely creative!

Next, we looked at each of the five senses in detail, starting with the sense of touch.

• Sense of Touch: We use our hands to feel things.
  We brought out cotton balls, beads, and a net. The kids touched each of these items so they could feel the difference in textures (soft/fluffy, hard/flat/bumpy, rough). After introducing these new words and sensations, the kids sorted each item by texture.
  
  We then read "Touch and Feel Farm" (An older version of this book)

• Sense of Taste: We use our mouths to taste things.
  Next, we moved on to the sense of taste. We brought out samples of items that are salty (salt), sour (lemon juice) and sweet (sugar). As expected, the kids gravitated towards the sugar!
  
  
  
• Sense of Smell: We use our noses to smell things.
  Using plastic bags with holes in them, the kids used their noses to try to decipher smells and guess what the items might taste like. We used vanilla extract (smells sweet), lemon juice (smells sharp/sour), and coffee grounds (smells bitter). We thought that the coffee grounds probably wouldn't be too good to eat.
  
  
• Sense of Sight: We use our eyes to see things.
  Making up "I Spy" glasses, we used them to find plastic Easter eggs that were scattered around the room.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Sense of Hearing: We use our ears to hear things.
  After picking up the eggs we found with our "I Spy" glasses and our eyes, the kids used their sense of hearing to match up the sounds of the eggs (The eggs had either dried pieces of rice or small bells inside them). By shaking them and comparing them, the kids guessed what sounds matched each other.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

The last book of the session was "The Very Lonely Firefly," which the kids liked because of the flashing firefly lights at the end of the book. We ended the session with a Goodbye Song (sung to "The Farmer in the Dell"):

Now our day is done.
We've had a lot of fun.
It's time to go,
So don't be slow.
Goodbye to everyone.
Put your things away.
It's time for us to say.
"Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,"
Until another day.

Suggestions: For future classes on the five sessions, it would probably be a good idea to do one sense per session, rather than try to cram everything in at once.

I hope the kids enjoyed the session as much as I had preparing for it!