Uniquely U

This week has been lessons on our 5 senses and the letter U. We have been learning about Us, and how God made us unique and wonderful.

We'll still be doing the 5 senses through the rest of this week, but I thought I'd show you what we have done so far.

The first sense we talked about was Touch. We read a variety of books on touch including a Touch and Feel book on tractors, and "What Happens When You Touch and Feel?" by Joy Richardson.

For one of our activities, I put a variety of items into a bag and had each child reach into the bag and try figure out what the item was just by feeling it. Some of the items included a hairy scrunchy, a wire dish scrubber, a battery, a block, lip gloss, a spoon, a beater, a ruler, an orange, a small ball, a silk leaf, and a tape dispenser.


After the kids figured out what all the items were, I then had them put socks on their hands and try the activity again. We discussed how it was much harder to feel the items with socks on our hands.

We did a similar activity for our Sound sense. I blindfolded the kids and then made a variety of sounds for them to guess. Some of the sounds included crumpling paper, zipping a zipper, jingling change, dropping a spoon, opening and shutting a book, and closing a door.

For another activity, the kids painted self-portraits. (Cousin Sydnee was visiting one day and participated in Kindergarten with us!)

Yesterday we learned about all our senses the fun way...baking! We made banana muffins, chocolate chip cookies, and zucchini bread. We talked about how we were using our senses and we discovered that our favorite sense that day was the sense of taste! Mmmm!

For the lesson on the smell sense, I blindfolded the kids and they had to try guess a variety of items just by smelling them. I had them smell apple sauce, black pepper, a candle, lemon juice, cinnamon, Nate's cologne, an onion, and some lotion. The kids were able to guess all the items and thought the activity was so fun that they went and found some items for me guess (one of which, was a dirty sock!).

We also discussed which items were good-smelling, and which items were bad-smelling. The unanimous verdict on the worst smell was the onion!

I found this worksheet where the kids had to sort the different smells and determine if they were smells they liked or smells they didn't like. It was fun seeing what they thought smelled good or not so good!
(Found on http://www.firstschoolyears.com/science/ourselves/ourselves.htm)

I found worksheets for all the senses on http://www.tlsbooks.com/kindergartenworksheets.htm. Madison, who normally doesn't care much for worksheets, has really enjoyed doing these and has asked to even do more of them!

I know the book shown is about the "seeing" sense (which we haven't done yet), but I returned the other books to the library already, and wanted to show you what the books look like that we have been using to learn more about our senses. Joy Richardson has several of them, and they have been great resources! Not only do they present the information in a kid-friendly way, but they also contain fun activities to do to reinforce the concepts.

As I mentioned, we have been talking quite a bit about how God created us unique, so we turned our foam lowercase "u" into a unique person!

We also created smelling flowers using paper, muffin cups, pom-poms, and a good-smelling body spray.

(Idea from http://www.twigglemagazine.com/March-activities/scented-flowers-craft.html)

More on the senses to come!