Five Senses, Storytelling with Masks, and the Letter L!

This week we studied the five senses.

• At Large Group:
• We read both fiction and non-fiction books about our senses.

• At group time each day we explored two different senses. We encouraged the kiddos to use their words to describe what they saw, smelled, tasted, felt, and heard.
• Smell: We made up smelling jars with about 25 different smells ranging from sweet to stinky.We were really impressed by how good the kiddos did identifying the smells.

Licorice!

Bananas!

Hot Sauce!

Stinky!

There were a lot of faces like this and a lot of laughter. :)

Oranges!

Cookies! (Vanilla)

• We also used spices to create paints to use at the art area.

They enjoyed all the different colors they made.

They tried to identify these by smell as well.

• Hearing: We made sound shakers out of plastic eggs with several different items in them: rice, seeds, play dough, pom poms, beads, and buttons.

We put the items that were in the eggs in the cups as well. The kiddos chose which item they thought was inside the egg.

They decided that hard things like buttons made a loud sound and soft things like play dough made a quiet sound.

They also smelled them to try and find clues on what was inside.

•  Sight: We talked with the kiddos about how people get their eyes tested to see if they need glasses. We put a children's eye chart up and had they take an "eye test". They did great with this! Then we put a blindfold on them and had them try to use their other senses to try and get around (this was monitored very closely so no one got hurt). Some told us it was fun and some told us it was scary not to be able to see. 

• We take a lot of pictures in our class and the kiddos enjoy taking them, too. Now they have their own "camera".

She kept going around the room saying "Say Cheese!"

• Touch: We used "feely" boxes to see if we could tell what we were touching by only using our hands. We had sand paper, pine needles, play dough, and foam. They were afraid to put their hand in there at first.

"Squishy"

"Soft and Smooth"

"Scratchy"

After we finished with the "feely" box we took the items out and had them come up with describing words.

They also came up with other items that were squishy, scratchy, pokey, and soft.

•  We used our sense of touch to play with ice, too. We tried to melt ice by floating it in water, sprinkling it with salt, holding it in our hands, stomping on it, blowing on it, and by dropping it down our shirt (everyone giggled at this one). 

• Taste: We did a taste test during snack on Wednesday. We had four different tastes - sour, sweet, bitter, and salty. We had them guess which one they thought they were tasting. Some of the facial expressions they made were hilarious. 

Sour!

Sour!

•  I found a great resource over the long weekend that had a ton of great masks you could print off. I printed a few sets at home and offered some others to the kids to color and make their own at choice time. We used our masks to tell/act out stories (Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and 5 Little Monkeys Swinging from a Tree). They had a blast with this! But for me the best part was the fact that they got into character and used voices and narrated the stories themselves. :)

• As this was a short school week, I didn't get many pictures taken at choice time but this was too cute not to share. 

She was using my legs as the train tunnel. She was absolutely giddy with giggles. It was one of those moments that remind me why I do what I do. :)

•  Our letter of the week was 'L'. Some of our activities include: 
• Practicing saying the sound the letter makes.
• Using the white boards to practice writing the letter at large group.
• Making our alphabet book page for each letter at small group.
• Identifying the letter.
• Searching the room for things that start with the letter sound and feeding them to the letter monster.
• Seeing who has the letter in their name.