Our Five Senses

This week was a short one for us, so we decided to work on something that didn't require much prep time and that was an easy unit to cover just the basics. So I came up with the 5 Senses, since we are entering the holiday season we'll be on sensory overload soon.

Above is our repurposed learning trays, into sensory trays.
 Each tray had a picture of a sense and an activity to expaned on it.

Here's our sight tray...

we used a magnifying glass to look closly at the detail on objects we found on an afternoon walk.

Exploring with our eyes.

One of our touch activities. I placed all these objects in the empty tissue box and B would try to figure out what he felt in the box. We talked about objects being hard, soft, bumpy, squishy etc.

Another one of our touch activities: I filled sandwich baggies with different objects, such as sand, salt rocks, shampoo, & jelly. You can't really go wrong with it, it's all about describing textures. I have heard of putting small objects inside the others (glitter, small toys, sea shells etc.) sort of like a hide & seek. *Make sure you tape the top of the baggies, so little ones don't try to open them and make a hugh mess.

This is our funny felt man for five senses. We have differnt noses, eyes, ears, & mouth so B was able to come up with some funny faces. You could also use Mr. Potato Head for the same kind of activity, if you have multiple facial pieces.

Here is one of our review of the 5 Senses activities. Each page has a sense on it & we looked through magazines and papers to find objects that we either touch, taste, hear, smell or see. This was meant to be a cutting activity as well, but B kept cutting through the pictures he wanted and was becoming frustrated...it had already been a rough day, so sometimes we compramise. Instead he'd find the pictures and Mommy would cut them out.

Here are some of the other sensory activities we did but didn't get a picture of...

Smell: Sniff bottles, we used old spice contaniners and dropped a cotton ball with different smells in each (vanilla, lemon, orange, garlic etc.). We made popcorn (covers many senses).

Hearing: We listened to music and then played different instruments. We also read a short story & then I asked questions to see if B was listening. (what kind of food did the boy cook? popcorn, ice cream or apples)

Taste: We sampled different kinds of foods and talked about how they tasted; were they salty/sweet/bitter/sour.

 There were a lot more activities I wanted to cover with this unit, but since our week was short we'll just have to review the 5 Senses again some time.

Of course, we used multiple senses on many things all the time, so we made it a game of "what senses do we use for ___ ?" This game was so fun Daddy even got in on it.

Here are a few of our books about the senses. We even looked at abstract art books, which B really seemed to enjoy...wonder where he gets that from. ;)