Our school is a doing a summer course program on the human body, and we want to focus on the 5 senses.
We hope to be able to make a permanent display of the 5 senses, that we can keep out in the hallway.
I’m wondering if anyone has done something like this before…not just in-class activities, but something that can be repeated and repeated without being overly cared for…something you might find in a science museum…that kind of thing.
A little help here! 
Thanks
jds
[quote=“jdsmith”]Our school is a doing a summer course program on the human body, and we want to focus on the 5 senses.
We hope to be able to make a permanent display of the 5 senses, that we can keep out in the hallway.
I’m wondering if anyone has done something like this before…not just in-class activities, but something that can be repeated and repeated without being overly cared for…something you might find in a science museum…that kind of thing.
A little help here!
Thanks
jds[/quote]
Did the five senses last week actually.
Have a five senses poem that works pretty well.
[quote=“Bassman”]
Did the five senses last week actually.
Have a five senses poem that works pretty well.[/quote]
Well?? What is it?
[quote=“jdsmith”][quote=“Bassman”]
Did the five senses last week actually.
Have a five senses poem that works pretty well.[/quote]
Well?? What is it?
[/quote]
Copyright makes it impossible to post it here.
However, there’s always email for these things.
There’s six actually.
I see dead people
[quote=“Richardm”]There’s six actually.
[/quote]
sex.
That’s what you were thinking about, right.
This is one of my favorite themes to do with preschools. I have tweaked some of my favorite activities so they can be done with emergent (and beyond) readers/writers.
Smell - Number film canisters and poke a hole in the lid. Put in a cotton ball soaked or coated in various liquids and powders such as perfume, lemon juice, cocoa powder, baby powder, peanut oil (or butter), suntan lotion (for coconut), vanilla extract, almond extract, mint extract or oil, rose water, cinnamon powder, orange oil…
Have slips with the different scents written on them and have the students fill out the slips to see if they can detect the smells.
Vision - Display some optical illusions or directions for making the “sausage finger”. Also try some residual color pictures (where after looking at them and then a white surface, you see the opposite color) and stereograms. Think about including some samples of tests to determine color blindness. A pair of 3-D glasses and 3-D pictures…
Hearing - have a fill-in test where students can figure out the hearing range some animals have (bats, whales, and elephants have some extreme ranges). Tie a tuning fork and a surface for the students to tap it on and observe how the sound can change as you move it closer and farther away from you ear. Burn a CD of 10-20 sound effects (some downloadable SFX can be easily found on websites) and have the students write the sound they hear. Have paper tubes, such as a toilet paper tube, a foil wrap tube, and a paper towel tube (I was lucky enough to get a 5-foot long contact paper tube when I taught simple physics last summer), and compare each tube to discover how the ability to hear sound improves as the tube gets longer.
Touch - Put different grades of sandpaper into empty tissue boxes. Have the students put the boxes in order of roughest to smoothest based on what they feel inside the box. Have a feel bag with different kinds of paper (wax paper, wrapping paper, the sticky part of a post-it note, sandpaper, corrugated cardboard, wallpaper samples, etc.) where the students have to determine the texture (smooth, rough, slippery, sticky, bumpy, etc.) before pulling the paper out to check their answer. Cut out letters from sandpaper and glue words inside a tissue box with the top cut off. Without looking, have the students write down the letters they feel. They can check to see if they got the right word by turning the box around.
Not sure how to do a taste display where the children are working independently and besides…as I tell my kids, “If I gave you the answers now, I’d have to follow you around for the rest of your lives and tell you all the answers.”
Have fun!
I was thinking of a touch book too…full of different textured things…
CD idea is GREAT!!!
Taste: I was thinking of putting up a tongue with the taste parts and a small plate a salt, sugar, lemon and…uhh, whats the other one…lol hot pepper…
Thanks Imaniou! 
Oh, I was thinking that you wanted independent hands-on experimentation going on. I guess you could put up displays that they could just read, but it’s so much more fun (and more Science and Industry museum-like) to have interactive diplays.
Ooh, ooh…how about putting q-tips in a jar and having various clear liquids such as sugar water, salt water, and baking soda water which would have no olefactory or visual cues (or else I would also suggest lemon water) and have the students determine if it has a sweet, salty, or bitter taste. You could the same thing with powders (more easily recognized however by color, texture, and smell) such as powdered sugar, crushed salt, lemonade powder (e.g. Kool-Aid), and cocoa powder or baking soda. Put up reminders to not double dip and put a trash can nearby so you don’t get litter.
No no, I do…I want the kids to read something too though…I want exactly that…all hands on…maybe with explanatory posters on the wall behind them
John, this site has some pretty interesting stuff. Here’s a link to their sensory handouts learningpage.com/free_pages/ … enses.html
Kent