The Toast Project: Featuring the 5 senses

Target Audience: Pre-K, Pre-Kindergarten, Kindergarten or lower elementary grades science nutrition or the 5 senses activity or project

 

I was trying to come up with a simple solution for explaining what the 5 senses were to my 3 year old. The 6 year old has a fairly good idea already and did some of the more usual explorations at public school in the fall (spoil sports) so I planned on trying to avoid the whole ‘blindfold and taste’ sort of thing. I wanted to come up with an idea for exploring all 5 senses in a super simple way, and as I was working on laminating a 5 senses manipulative/game set, I realized how many things encompass several senses at once.

 

In fact it would be hard to say which is more useful in the case of say, a puppy. You hear a puppy pant and bark, you see a puppy wag its tail, you feel the soft fur, you smell dust or dog shampoo… I suppose a toddler might try to eat the puppy in a nice way of course… but you get the idea, how do you place those cards into categories, especially side by side? It’s impossible, right? You have to talk about them all at the same time. A more vocal child might argue the point.

 

That’s how the toast project was born. I took a simple concept of something that you could use all 5 senses to explore, we happened to be studying the grains group at the same time and the combination of bread and toast is perfect! Before the toaster, it has many different properties than after the toaster, doesn’t it?

 

 

All Ages: 

Examine bread and toast with a magnifying glass.

For younger kids:

True sensory exploration, touching each and explaining orally or drawing the differences as it is discussed. New words might be texture, spongy, vision, sight, compare, examine, along with familiar words like color, sound, touch, taste.

Questions to explore:

How does each piece of bread/toast SOUND as it is folded or eaten?

What happens inside the toaster? How does it look different?

Does it taste different?

How does it feel different?

Does it smell different?

Is it still bread?

Older kids:

Allow them to observe the bread and toast and write down the differences, listing each sense in a different column.

Ask them to write 5 other items that you could list in at least 3 sense categories.

Rhyme words with toast and bread (or pan/jam)

 

Note: A piece of white bread as pictured above would work best, as the color change would be the most obvious.