Project 103: The Five Senses

We don't restrict ourselves to the national curriculum, but we do occasionally flip through the revision guides to check that we've covered the sorts of things that should be covered. Looking through the Key Stage 1 revision guide we realised we hadn't done an explicit project on the senses, so that became this week's project.

We restricted ourselves to the five traditional senses for experiments and activities (although we did include a brief discussion of other senses such as proprioception), and started the week with an exploration of the senses in Usborne's Children's Encyclopaedia and Usborne's Junior Illustrated Science Dictionary

We started our experiments with 3 taste experiments from the Usborne 100 Science Experiments, exploring whether different flavours taste better on different parts of your tongue, how your smell and taste are connected, and how taste is dependent on saliva when it comes to dry food.

Taste and the Tongue

To emphasis the importance of using multiple senses we also explored how things that look the same can smell different, and how things that look different can smell the same.

Jars of similar smelling and looking liquids. 

We explored the sensitivity of touch on different parts of the body with a two-point discrimination test.

Two-point discrimination results

Finally, we did a 'touch' craft activity, incorporating materials that represented the touch-based adjectives the children came up with.

Solomon (left) and Monica's (right) touch hands. 

Next week's project: The Georgians.