What are our senses?
Students will usually name taste, smell, touch, seeing and hearing.
As you walk, tell them about another sense: proprioreception - the sense of knowing where your body parts are. Receptors in your muscles and tendons send signals to your brain to compute where your body is at any given moment.
First explore what it is like to be without the sense of sight.
Visual deprivation activity.
Optional: give students environments to smell, to see if they can guess what they are e.g. soil and rotting leaves from a forest floor; sand and seaweed from a beach.
Discuss how smells are complicated and are mixtures of a lot of things, and how they evoke memories.
Smell and taste work together
Jelly bean taste test activity
Discuss how smell works.
Look at taste buds on students' tongues, and discuss how taste works.
Finally, experiment further with receptors for touch:
There are many different kinds of touch receptors: touch, temperature, pain.
Touch test to find out how far apart touch receptors are.
Temperature sensing activity.
See other lesson plans for a focus on one sense: smells, eyes.
