With a few families missing our BeeHive sessions, I decided to pause on our Leave No Trace Unit and spend Friday studying the Five Senses! There are so many activities that demonstrate using the 5 Senses and it is pretty easy to scaffold these lessons to meet the needs, abilities and interests of multiple age levels! While I did do an activity for each sense, I wanted to highlight two favorites from this last Friday -- Sound and Taste!
Sound!! Students are always commenting on different sounds they hear in the forest while we are hiking or sitting down for a lesson. Very seldom do they spend time just listening though! For sound, I had the students find a cozy spot along the shore of our beautiful lake with a pencil and their journals.This activity is called a Sound Map and involves sitting quietly for a certain amount of time and to journal what they hear. The students create a symbol to represent themselves in their journal and then while sitting, map different sounds they hear around their personal symbol they drew. Some students might write out the words for things they hear (example: a-i-r-p-l-a-n-e, b-i-r-d), a few students found themselves writing out the actual sound (buzzzz, tweet tweet, flapping) while other just draw pictures to represent what they hear (a picture of a saw or a picture of a chipmunk). These can be natural sounds or man-made! I tell students they can create their map however they want but they will share it with others when we are done. My Hive enjoyed this activity so much that they asked to sit for another 5 minutes!
Below: Students sit quietly for 10 minutes by Payette Lake recording sounds they hear.
Below: An example of a second graders Sound Map
The last activity for the day and the class favorite was creating making our own Candy Experiment to focus on Taste. After Halloween I found myself with an access of leftover candy and figured my students would not have a problem with helping me get rid of it. The first thing I did was pull out 8 different types of chocolate, remove them from their wrappers and place them in an instructor labeled bag. I made sure to have one piece per student. I used this activity to work on our math skills by having students create a table, practice counting tallies, and making a graph using data they collected. Students had to create three labels to describe the taste of the candy. They tried each candy bar (without knowing the flavor) and then placed a mark in their table. To finish up their graph had to have a key, title and use their candy data. It was so funny to see their reactions when I told them the candy types! Almost all of them had a type that is usually their favorite but they marked it as "gross or revolting".
Below: A second graders candy graph! He decided he wanted to make his graph have more information. After marking down the flavors, he decided to then add if the candy was hard or soft!
Below: A 5 year old's graph. This student has been making graphs with us the last few weeks. He understands how to set up a graph and that a graph is used for measuring. I had him add the "data" he wanted and transcribed.
Send me a message if you are interested in learning more activities for the 5 Senses! There is still SIGHT, SMELL and TOUCH. Or if you are wondering how I taught these lessons for ages 5 to 9!
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