Summary of Unit

Second grade students will explore the senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste in this health unit using various simple experiments.

Invitation

How important are your five senses? Come along and Join us for this fun unit where we explore the fabulous five senses.

Situation
Depending on the availability of the technology lab, this unit should be completed in 10 thirty-minute time sessions. Most of this unit will be completed in our classroom.

Projects

The students will use the Internet to research and discover facts on each of the five senses. Most of these lessons will be done individually.

They will use these facts to create a class video describing the different senses. This video will be viewed by first graders and be sent in to BrainPop.com for review.

Tasks

1. Smell- Students will use the Internet to view and read the story of The Gingerbread Man. They will then make paper gingerbread men cutouts. They will place glue on their tummies and sprinkle them with spices such as cinnamon and ginger. They will use them as scratch and sniff cards.

2. Taste- Students will conduct the "Pepsi Challenge" using a kit offered off the web site of www.pepsi.com. They will conduct this experiment with students from other classrooms. We will make a large display of the results to post in the main entry way of our school.

3. Sight- Students will read a story in our reading textbook about optical illusions. Then the students will have the chance to visit an optical illusions web sight at http://members.aol.com/Ryanbut/optical.htmI , giving them several examples to test their eyesight on!

4. Hearing - We will use our sense of hearing to recognize recorded sounds on a cassette tape. Sounds could include piano playing, sirens, dog barking, baby crying, etc. The students will then as a class compare sounds and will make a class list of words describing different sounds.

5. Touch - Students will conduct an experiment on how things feel by placing various objects in a pillow case one at a time. Call students forward one at a time to feel the object in the bag and describe how it feels, (soft, hard, rough, smooth, or bumpy) the shape, and the size of the object. To extend this activity, groups could take some the objects used and glue them to poster board by groups of similar feel. An example of this could be cotton, silk fabric, and wax paper to make a smooth or soft group.

Standards

Local and Kansas Science and Health Standards

Assessment

*Daily work in class

*Class critique of final video.

*Final test over unit.

Tools

Computer, Internet Access, Brown Construction Paper, Spices, Pepsi and Coke Soft Drink Samples, Cassette Tape of Sounds, Poster Board, Various Objects for Touch Experiment