Description

What our Five Senses lesson plan includes

Lesson Objectives and Overview: Five Senses teaches students about sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Students will learn how to define each and explain their differences. They will also be able to discuss how each one is useful. This lesson is for students in 1st grade, 2nd grade, and 3rd grade.

Classroom Procedure

Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the yellow box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand.

You will need to gather a number of items for the journal activity, as well as for the lesson overall. The items you will need to introduce the lesson are blinking lights, sweet or sour candy, mothballs, a loud alarm clock or loud music, and a fan. For the journal task, you will need items that are specific to one sense. Ideas include photos, a book, perfume, flowers, sandpaper, Play-Doh, a radio, lemon juice, and salt water.

Options for Lesson

There are a few suggestions in the “Options for Lesson” section for additional activities that you can include if you have time or want to extend the lesson. One idea is to have students write a poem or song about the five senses. You could also go outdoors and search for examples of items that represent each of the senses. Another idea is to read a short story and have students name the senses characters use as the story progresses. One final idea is to discuss how one sense can grow stronger when another is lost, such as improved hearing when a person loses their sight.

Teacher Notes

The paragraph on this page provides a little extra information or guidance for the lesson. It explains the importance of finding what works for your class. You may want to divide the lesson into smaller lessons that focus on one sense at a time instead, for instance. Use the blank lines to write down any other ideas or thoughts you have for the lesson before you present it to the class.

FIVE SENSES LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES

Sight and Hearing

The Five Senses lesson plan contains two pages of content. The lesson begins by asking a series of questions. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you smell? What do you feel? What do you taste? Students will discover that the answers to these questions relate specifically to what we call the five senses, and they will learn how exactly each one works.

First, students will learn about sight. Sight depends on the eyes. Inside the eye, there are special lenses that absorb light to help people see. If there isn’t enough light, people can’t see. This means the sight depends on the presence of light. Of course, too much light isn’t good either and can cause people to lose their sense of sight.

The second sense students will learn about is hearing. Hearing depends on the ears. There are two parts of the ear: the outer ear and the inner ear. The outer ear is the part other people can see, the part of the body on the sides of the head. It catches sound as it travels toward it. The inner ear takes the sound vibrations and sends them to the brain for understanding.

Smell, Touch, and Taste

Next, students will discuss the sense of smell, which, of course, depends on the nose. Inside the nose, there is a substance that takes in the fumes of an odor and sends a message to the brain to identify the odor. When someone gets a cold, which affects the nose, their sense of smell weakens. The nose also helps clean the air we breathe in, and it also affects the way we speak. If someone closes their nose while they talk, their voice changes. The sense of smell affects taste to some degree as well.

Touch or feeling is the next sense. There are certain parts of the skin that collect information and send it to the brain. This means that the sense of touch works throughout the entire body. Some parts of the body are more sensitive to touch than other parts.

Finally, students will learn about taste. The taste buds on the tongue allow people to sense four specific types of flavors: salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. Many foods contain multiple flavors, such as both sweet and sour at the same time. The tongue can also detect whether something is hot, cold, creamy, crunchy, or dry.

FIVE SENSES LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS

The Five Senses lesson plan includes three worksheets: a journal page, a review worksheet, and a homework assignment. Each handout will help reinforce students’ understanding of the content and concepts they learned throughout the lesson. The guide on the classroom procedure page outlines when to hand out each worksheet to the students. You are welcome to alter or adjust wherever needed.

JOURNAL PAGE

For this part of the lesson, you will first need to divide students into groups of two or three. Distribute the items you collected in preparation for the lesson among the groups of students. Throughout the rest of the class period, the items will rotate to different groups (or students will rotate to different items). Students will write down or draw pictures of the items one by one. They will use the items to observe which sense they used with relation to the item. There are five different spaces to write about five different items.

REVIEW PAGE

There are several sections on the review page. Students will first match statements to the sense it represents. For instance, “The chirping birds woke me up in the morning” would relate to hearing. The second section asks students to write an example of each sense as it relates to the classroom at that moment. If they hear kids talking or smell something specific, they can write about those things. The final section requires students to recognize words that relate to specific senses. Words like see and vision, for example, relate to sight. Words like bitter and sour would refer to taste.

FIVE SENSES HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT

For the homework assignment, students will sit outside of their house and observe their environment. They will write examples of what they see, hear, smell, feel, and taste. They will also write the time they started and the time they ended the activity. The directions dictate that students should stay outside for at least 15 minutes. It also states that they can complete the activity indoors if they can’t go outside. If they want to, students can choose to draw pictures of what they observe rather than, or in addition to, writing about it.

Worksheet Answer Keys

There are three pages in the lesson plan that provide answer keys for two of the worksheets. For the journal page, the answer key provides a sample answer that you can also use to explain the activity with your students. For the review page, the answer key provides the answers in red except for the second section. Students’ responses will vary on this section, so the answer key is blank for this section. There is no answer key for the homework assignment as there are no right or wrong answers. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.