A lot of people are now homeschooling their children and they may not be sure where to start. They may be overwhelmed with schoolwork sent home to complete, creating a schedule, etc. I will try to post more frequently during this time to provide more FREE and fun activities for parents and caregivers.
I came across this FREE Five Senses Packet on Teachers Pay Teachers and LOVE IT! This is targeted towards K-2, but even older children can have fun with some of these activities. You can download this freebie HERE.
This packet includes activities for sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste.
Sight Activity
Children will go on a My Five Senses Nature walk for their sight activity. Print out the nature walk page and find pencil along with a clipboard, magazine, book or other portable hard surface for students to place their paper on to write their observations.
While outside, students will draw and/or write the things they see, hear, touch, smell, and the things they should NOT taste.
Sound Activity
For this activity, a YouTube video was linked to the PDF to play various sounds. Children will make a hypothesis, or guess, after they hear each sound. After the guess is written down, the sound is played again on the video but the curtain rolls up and reveals an image telling what the sound is. Children will write down the correct sound if their hypothesis was wrong.
This video contains more than 10 sounds, so it tells you the time stamps for each sound. You could go ahead and do all of the sounds if you wanted to! The kids thought this was really fun. It was also really funny to hear some of their guesses. We ended up listening to all of the sounds and one sound was a tiger. My students guessed the tiger sound was someone sleeping!!
Smell Activity
What’s that Smell? Choose six items from the chart above, or come up with some of your own! Children will need to be blindfolded or will need to keep their eyes shut so they can make a guess based on smell alone.
Set Up:
Put the items into containers, cups, whatever you have on hand. Write on the container or put a post it note or piece of paper on or near each container. Children will smell each container and make a guess and record it on their sheet. They will record if they liked the smell or not and then at the end of the activity, they will record what the smell actually was!
Taste Activity
The Tasty Test is a very fun activity. Children will test salty, sweet, sour, and bitter food items. WARNING: Tell your children to take a SMALL bite of the bitter chocolate, one of my students took a very big bite and started gagging! Yikes.
Children will color in a happy face or a mad face based on what they thought about each tasty test item.
Touch Activity
There is not a specific touch activity in this packet. You could do a craft such as the one I will post below using different textured items.
Examples of textures and materials:
- Fuzzy: pipe cleaners
- Bumpy: puffy paint, non slip foam liner
- Rough: sandpaper, burlap
- Hard: googly eyes, noodles
- Fluffy: pom pom, cotton balls
- Smooth: tin foil, stickers
- Soft: felt, feathers
- Crinkly: tissue paper, paper bag
- Squishy: foam
Textured Easter Egg Craft
With Easter around the corner, I decided to make “texture eggs”. To make textured eggs, simply cut an egg shape out of a large piece of cardstock or paper (I used 12×12 paper) and then cut different materials into strips. Glue them onto the egg. When finished, cut the portions of the strips that extend over the egg so you are left with the egg shape.
I chose six textures to put on our egg: fluffy (blue and green pom poms), smooth (purple metallic cardstock), soft (orange felt), crinkly (white tissue paper), squishy (pink foam), and fuzzy (yellow pipe cleaners). We talked about what each material felt like before we glued them onto the egg.
These are just a few activities you can do when exploring the five senses! Enjoy!
