We started a new unit on the 5 senses. I always like to teach this unit in the spring so that the children can use their five senses to explore the changes that are taking place around them. We started off the unit last week by taking a spring walk around our school to look for changes that were happening. We used our "eyes" and our sense of sight to discover that trees had started to grow green leaves on them, flowers were blooming, birds were flying around, and grass was coming back.
This is the tree we can see from our classroom window. We have watched it go through the changes each season. At the beginning of April it still had very little leaves on it. Now look at it!
After our walk, we sat down on the soccer field and started to complete the first page of our "spring journal." In this book, we wrote about things we saw on our walk and some other things that we can see in springtime (such as bees, butterflies, bugs, etc...). Each time we explore a new sense, we will work on another page in this journal.
This week we talked about the sense of hearing. To explore sound, I stood behind the cubbies and made noises with different instruments, tools or objects (drums, xylophone, bells, maracas, jingle bells, egg shakers, microphone, etc..). The children could not see what I was doing and needed to rely only on their sense of hearing to try to figure out what I was using. We talked about different words to use to describe the sounds I made, including soft, low, high, fast, slow and loud. After all of the objects were revealed, the children could play with them and explore how they could make sounds too. They had a lot of fun doing this.
We also talked about the sense of smell this week. To explore this sense, I passed around different plastic bags or containers that had different smells in them. The bags had cotton balls soaked with smells such as lemon juice, vanilla, and lilac spray. The containers held different spices or ingredients, including oregano, cinnamon, cocoa powder, orange, garlic and onion. As each object was passed around, the children needed to try to describe the smell and figure out what it was. This was tricky for many of them. However, with some helpful hints to guide them in the right direction they were able to get most of them. They also came up with words to describe the different smells, including sweet, strong, spicy, good/not good. This was a fun activity for the children.
