Book of the week
My Five Senses by Aliki.
Synopsis
Sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch-our five senses teach us about our world.
This is a Level 1 Let's-Read-and-Find-Out, which means the book explores introductory concepts perfect for nursery age children and supports the Common Core Learning Standards and Next Generation Science Standards.
Weekly Activities
This week's activity focused on the five senses (touch, taste, hear, smell, sight) and the aim was to make some lovely smelling 'perfume' that the children could take home and give to a loved one. We put out lots of resources that the children could use including dried herbs, fresh herbs, flowers, petals, and fragrant leaves. The children could make up their own recipe for their perfume that we wrote down for them to follow. They smelt each item that they put in before mixing it - cinnamon, thyme, rosemary, coffee, mint, lavender, garlic, sage etc, counting and sorting them, cutting where necessary. They used a pestle and mortar for crushing and mixing and a funnel to dilute with water. The recipe was then strained through a muslin cloth or sieve and they grater for shredding. Once they had crushed, mixed, strained and poured their recipes into jars they had a good smell and put the lid on so they could take them home.
Aims and Objectives
Support the children with their hand-eye coordination, by developing their fine motor skills through pouring and grating, writing on the labels. Gross motor skills by use of pestle and mortar
To explore media and materials and mark making, to have the opportunity to be creative, designing a perfume themselves and writing a recipe
To gain an understanding of ‘volume’ and maths when counting out leaves and measurements from recipes
To grow their knowledge of herbs, spices and the places that they can be grown/countries they are from etc
To grow in confidence in talking in a familiar group about what they have made
To have the opportunity to use the tablet to take photos of what they have made and access the ones that they have taken or upload them to Tapestry
Home Activity
What's in the box?
Find a cardboard box and make a small, hand sized hole in it. Put some interesting items in the box but don't show your child what they are. Then ask your child to try and guess what the items are by putting their hand in the box and feeling them one by one. You'll probably get a few 'I don't knows' to start with keep going and encourage your child to guess. If they can't guess the items, try asking them to describe what they object feels like. This will encourage them to use their imaginations and also to use descriptive language.
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