Summer Science Lesson Plan – Reactions



Summer Science Lesson Plan: The Five Senses

Overview/Motivation:

• Learn about the 5 senses

• Do some fun activities that involve the different senses

• Entertain and interest the children

• Note: if you have older kids, you can go into detail about how the senses work. Some basics can be found in the Q&A section of the lesson plan

Materials:

• Non-see through plastic bag

• Cooked spaghetti

• Peeled grapes

• Bitter chocolate

• Milk Chocolate

• Something heavy to drop

Goals:

• Students should be able to list the 5 senses

• They should be excited about science and interested for next week

Vocabulary:

• Senses

o The different kinds of signals our bodies can perceive to understand the outside world

o They give us information that helps with everything we do in life

o 5 senses: Sight, Touch, Taste, Smell, Hearing

Lesson:

• Begin the lesson by introducing yourself and summer science

• Going around the room, have each child say his/her name, his/her favorite food, and his/her favorite movie

• Be sure to try and learn the names of your students as quickly as possible. You will get better responses out of them if you can call them by name

• Touch:

o Tell the children you brought a mystery bag with you to class today, and you want them to try and help you figure out what is in the bag, but they can only touch what is inside, they can’t look in the bag

▪ Take the bag of spaghetti/grapes around the room, and let each student stick their hand in and feel if they want to

▪ This should get a good response, as it will probably gross most of them out

▪ Ask them to guess what you have in the bag (write their responses on the board)

▪ Ask what kind of things they felt in the bag

▪ Tell them what it was at the end, and let them look

• Ask the students what people use to understand what is going on around them every day

o Answer: 5 senses (touch, sight, hearing, taste, and smell)

o The first part of the lesson was designed to challenge their sense of touch, to see if touch alone was enough to understand what was in the bag

o Realize that each sense is important, but to fully understand everything around them, a combination of the different senses is best

• Hearing:

o While you are talking, get the SC or JC to take a big book to the back of the room, and drop it loudly on the floor or on the desk, which should cause all of the kids to jump/react

o Ask the kids how they knew something was going on (they should respond that they heard the sound)

o Explain that hearing is often used as a defense mechanism for animals that get eaten by other animals (prey), i.e. rabbits have large ears so they can hear wolves sneaking up on them

o Ask for a volunteer to come to the front of the room and face the class

o Stand behind them, and snap your fingers a certain number of time

o Ask the student how many times you did it and see if they can tell where you snapped your fingers (you can do this a few times)

• Sight:

o Tell the kids that vision is obviously used to see what is around them, but it also plays other roles

o Ask the entire class to stand up

o See how long each student can stand on one foot with their eyes open

o Now have everyone close their eyes, and try to stand on one foot

o It is much more difficult to balance without sight – sight can be important in many different ways

• Taste and Smell:

o Taste and smell are very similar senses

o They let you know if something you are eating/smelling is bad or good for you (i.e. rotten food smells bad in general, but good food smells better)

o Tell the kids that you are going to give them some chocolate

o Pass out a small piece of bittersweet chocolate to each kid, and have them all eat it at the same time

o They probably won’t like it, and you can explain that there are 5 main tastes: sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter (which is what they tasted in that piece of chocolate)

o Let them smell any remaining bittersweet chocolate

o Give everyone a piece of milk chocolate so they can taste/smell the difference

• Ask the students why we need all of the different senses

o You can give them some examples for each if they can’t come up with good answers, but this should be easy

• Ask the students which sense they think is the most important

o There really isn’t a right/wrong answer, it is just something interesting for them to think about

o All of the senses are valuable, and give different advantages to different animals

• Tell them that we are excited to be teaching them this summer, and that they should be ready for some fun and educational activities with Summer Science during the rest of the summer

Q&A:

• How sight works:

o Eyes focus light and your retina can “see” based on what kind of light comes in

o Works like a camera

o The information is sent to the brain, which allows us to see like we do

• How hearing works:

o Sound goes into your ear, and vibrates your eardrum

o The brain can tell how the eardrum is vibrating, and uses that to tell different sounds

• How taste works:

o We have different taste buds in our mouths/on our tongue, each of which can tell one of the different kinds of flavor (bitter, sweet, sour, salt, unami (savory))

o The taste buds send signals to your brain so you know what your food tastes like

• How smell works:

o Similar to taste, your nose has receptors that send signals to your brain, letting it know what kind of smell you are experiencing

• How touch works:

o Your skin has various sensory receptors that can sense different kinds of physical or chemical stimuli

o When a certain kind of feeling is sensed, a message is sent to the brain

o We can feel texture, temperature, pressure, …

• Interesting facts:

o Each person has about 10,000 taste buds, and each bud has 100 taste receptors

o Taste and smell are related – if you hold your nose, it is hard to taste some things (that’s why people hold their nose when taking medicine)

o Every part of the human body can experience touch, even finger/toe nails

o Babies develop touch first and touch is the last sense to lose in old age

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