FIVE SENSES WEEK began our in depth exploration of each of our senses. We discussed how seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing are part of our experiences every day. Each day this week, we focused on a different sense and explored the many ways each affected how we experience the world around us.
Using our noses, we discovered so many different scents that we hadn’t noticed before. Once we sat and focused on SMELLING, we began to smell so many interesting things. In our Pre K class, we had a “Guess The Scent” experiment while we were blindfolded! We took a sniff of several different mystery snacks and tried to guess which yummy treat was in each cup. We must be snack experts with super strong senses of smell because we guessed so many of them correctly!
Did you know that we have tastebuds on our tongues? They help us determine if something is sweet, salty, bitter, or sour when TASTING. We later made food collages made up of foods in all of those categories. This was a wonderful exercise in teamwork! We helped our friends find, cut, and paste pictures, as we guessed what our tastebuds would tell us about each picture.
We practiced HEARING by being very still and quiet and listening to the sounds in and around our classrooms. We could hear our friends and teachers singing, playing, giggling, reading, and even heard the babies cooing in the infant room! Sometimes just listening to others’ happiness, makes us smile! We were fascinated to learn about the parts that make up our ears and help us to hear all these amazing sounds!
We stopped to look around us and focused on SEEING details in things we hadn’t paid attention to before. While playing “I Spy”, we gave our friends clues as our eyes focused on a new object. The more adjectives we used, the faster our friends were able to guess what we were seeing!
Lastly, we explored TOUCHING using different textures. In our Preschool class, we used mystery bags which contained different textured objects. We again used describing words, this time while we reached in and felt each item. We used words like soft, squishy, hard, sticky, cold, and slimy. The toddlers classroom had a whole sensory table covered in objects of all textures to help us understand what each adjective meant. We soon understood what words like slimy and squishy meant.
Through all our senses, our brain gets messages that help us determine what something smells, feels, tastes, sounds, and looks like. It’s amazing to learn how our senses work together! It was even more incredible to learn how lucky we are to experience all of the 5 senses each day!
Our very special helper in many of our classes this week was…Mr. Potato Head! He guided us through this week of sensory exploration. By week’s end, we created our own Mr. Potato Heads! As we added each of his parts, we called out which of the five senses was used. I think we’ve gotten the hang of this and are ready to go out into the world and experience new things…
