Teaching the five senses is a fun and easy beginning of the school year theme or unit and our five senses activities make it even better! Kids love learning about the senses because we all have and can connect with it. When we learn about the five senses, we use our Five Senses Research Project, art projects, snacks, and hands-on lessons to understand our senses and how they help us!
Five Senses Activities: Read Alouds
Here are some of our read-alouds for the five senses. As with all of our research projects, we read a book for the research part of the research project. The read-alouds provide us the information and learning that we can record on graphic organizers and in our research journal. (CLICK THE IMAGE TO SEE THE LIST ON AMAZON!)
One of our first activities after reading a book is a notice and wonder chart. This is a great first activity because it can provide you with some great insight into kids thinking about a book or topic. After we read My Five Senses, we did the notice and wonder chart.
Five Senses Activities: Lessons And Graphic Organizers
As we read our books and learn about the five senses, we record our learning on graphic organizers. These might be tree charts, circle charts, word webs, etc. Then, we record our learning in our research journal!
We try to do a great deal in our classroom by turning and talking. This is a great way to build language but it also helps our students build confidence in their answers and ideas. It’s a lot easier to share your ideas with 1 person and then share with the group. This chart is a great example of that. I had the kids turn and talk about things they saw. They shared with their partner, and then we shared our ideas and created this list. We did this with all five senses and created this great graphic organizer that we could refer to throughout our five senses activities.
Five Senses Activities: Sensory Word Jars
The five senses are also a great time to learn about adjectives or describing words. We do this fun sensory jar activity. We show pictures of items, and we first decide if we can use the senses for that item. Can we smell it? Can we taste it? If so, we add the item to our jar, and then we describe how it feels, smells, tastes, etc. Then we say a sentence: “The bacon tastes greasy.”
A fun modification to this lesson is to have students cut pictures from grocery store papers and add to the jars!
When we’re learning about the five senses we’re also making sure to go deep and have conversations about how the senses help us. In this video, we discuss how our senses keep us safe and help us learn.
Another fun five senses game the kids love was Five Senses Quiz Quiz Trade. Each student had a card with a sense on the card. They find a partner, identify the sense and share something they can do with that sense. They trade cards and find a new partner. This is another great way to get them to talk about the senses and build language and vocabulary.
Five Senses Activities: Bulletin Board Ideas
We love bulletin boards and fun ways to display student work. For our five senses unit, we did two easy and fun art projects that can be used for hallway displays or bulletin boards.
First, if you’re going to learn about the five senses, then you must involve Potato Head. And if you’re going to involve Potato Head, you must dress in a costume.
And then of course, you must create a Potato Head! These make a great five senses bulletin board. And as you’re doing the project, have students identify the senses, how they help us, examples of how we use the senses.
Another easy art project is a hand-print. Simply paint their hand with paint (they choose the color) and make a handprint!
Five Senses In Action
Of course, we want to apply our new learning, and we want to see if we can use our senses to describe stuff, so why not EAT?! Food is the perfect way to use all five senses! And good food is popcorn! Ya’ll. We love popcorn around here. And let me just say, the air popper was worth the money because every time we use it in the classroom, the kids are AMAZED! I mean AMAZED!
As the popcorn pops, we can use our hearing and sight. After the popcorn pops, we can use our senses of touch, smell, and taste to taste!
Another food that’s fun for the five senses is a coconut. We do this during our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom week!
Five Senses Freebie
Make sure to grab our ALL-INCLUSIVE Five Senses Research Project by clicking on the image below!
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