Grade 1 Science
Core Unit: Senses

Unit overview:

This unit emphasizes the identification of the five senses and the organ associated with each sense, as well as the protection of the sense organs from damage. The use of the senses to describe, identify and classify objects is the second major focus.

Related units:

The grade 3 Core Unit on the Properties of Matter, the grade 4 Optional Unit Senses, and the grade 5 Core Unit Matter and Its Changes all develop the topics introduced in this unit.

This unit may be integrated with the Health curriculum.

Suggested themes:

colour, describing the world, environment, senses, tastes, textures

Factors of scientific literacy which should be emphasized:

Common Essential Learnings foundational objectives which should be emphasized:

To promote both intuitive, imaginative thought and the ability to evaluate ideas, processes, experiences, and objects in meaningful contexts. (CCT)

To develop students' abilities to meet their own learning needs. (IL)

To support students in coming to a better understanding of the personal, moral, social, and cultural aspects of the study of science. (PSVS)

Science foundational and learning objectives:

Discuss the safe use of the sense organs.
1. Identify the parts of the sense organs which receive the input.
2. Recognize how to protect the sense organs from damage.
3. Appreciate the diverse uses of the senses.
Match each sense with the organ through which its sensory input is gathered.
1. Identify common sources of sound.
2. Identify objects by their odour, texture, taste, colour, sound, or other characteristics.
3. Determine the source of a sound or an odour.
4. Determine the colour produced when different colour pigments are mixed.
5. Appreciate the diversity and value of the information which we receive through our senses.
Exhibit ability to compare and classify.
1. Classify objects by using the senses.
2. Classify sound by pitch and by loudness.
3. Recognize that the same group of things may be classified in a number of ways.

Suggested Activities:

Prepare small paper bags which have a sample of some odorous material in them. Students could be encouraged to bring some materials from home to challenge the identification skills of their fellow students. A letter to parents requesting their help with this activity would be useful. Ensure that the samples brought from home are safe to use in this activity. For example, ammonia, oven cleaners, and powdered detergents are not safe. Onions, perfumes, soaps, spices, or wood shavings are just a few suggestions for the contents of the bags.
With their eyes closed, have students smell the contents of the bag and identify the odour. A list of words describing odours could be prepared. A quick and easy idea for a blindfold is to use a Halloween mask with the eye holes taped shut.
Have students list smells from the environment which would be difficult to put in a bag. Examples are: bread or donuts baking; smoke at a wiener roast; smoke from a fireplace.
Factors: B5, F3, G2
Objectives: 1.2, 2.1, 2.3
Assessment Techniques: 1, 3, 7c
Common Essential Learnings: Critical and Creative Thinking. In addition to reinforcing that sense of smell is a source of information about our environment, the students will receive practice in associating the information they receive with their prior experience.
An idea similar to the one in activity #1 is to bring a large box or cloth bag containing a variety of objects. One minute can be allowed for a student to identify as many items as possible by touch, using either hands or bare feet. As the student names an article, that article is removed from the bag and compared to the name.
Factors: B5, F3, G2
Objectives: 2.1, 2.3
Assessment Techniques: 1, 3, 7c
Common Essential Learnings: Critical and Creative Thinking, Personal and Social Values and Skills. As in activity #1, the students will be given practice in associating the information they acquire with what they already know and have experienced, and to make inferences. It is also a vehicle to help them appreciate how all the senses are often used together to evaluate their surroundings, and what would be the impact of being without one or more of the senses.
Develop a vocabulary chart of words that can be used to describe objects. Have the students make contributions to the list. When a student contributes a word, that student could become responsible for reading or explaining that word to others. Students could also illustrate their words and arrange the illustrations around the chart. Each word on the chart could be grouped according to the sense used. Sentences using the word in a descriptive context could be displayed.
Factors: A1, C4, G2, G3
Objectives: 2.1, 2.3
Assessment Techniques: 3, 5
Common Essential Learnings: Critical and Creative Thinking. The identification and classification of the words is an opportunity to compare what is being learned with their prior experiences.
Construction paper of various colours can be cut into circles, squares, triangles, trapezoids, parallelograms, and irregular shapes of two or three different sizes. Students sort the pieces into groups and state the criterion on which their sorting was based. This is repeated using different criteria.
Factors: A1, B5, C1, F3, G2
Objectives: 2.3, 3.1, 3.3
Assessment Techniques: 3, 7c, 8
Common Essential Learnings: Critical and Creative Thinking. The generation of alternative classification systems from the same set of objects allows students to begin to make the connection to the existence of different ways of knowing about or perceiving the same objects, events, or experience.
Take the students on a hike around the school yard. Have them collect a variety of small objects. Two or three per student is a convenient number. Each student or group of students might be given a specific assignment of what type of article to look for. Litter, leaves from trees or shrubs, pebbles, weeds from a flower bed, seeds, and flower or grass plants are examples. Encourage the students to find things that the other students don't notice. Ask the students to consult you if they are unsure about whether to gather some object. This is a good activity to encourage and emphasize respect for the environment.
Ask the students to classify what they have found. Encourage them to create categories into which to sort the collected items.
Small objects such as seeds and small pebbles can be examined with hand lenses. Ask them to describe what they see with the magnifier that they didn't see without it. Note: Remind them not to look at the sun through the hand lens.
These objects can then be classified according to various criteria. This is another opportunity to emphasize respect for the environment. In making the collections there should be no destruction of the environment.
Factors: B5, C1, C4, D1, E1, E2, G3
Objectives: 2.3, 3.1
Assessment Techniques: 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9
Common Essential Learnings: Critical and Creative Thinking, Personal and Social Values and Skills. The classification of objects promotes the development of Critical and Creative Thinking. In observing what items are found in the school yard, and in emphasizing the need for respect for the environment, the influence of the behaviour of the group and of the individual on the environment can be discussed. Are there plants or animals which live naturally in the area but are unable to survive in the school yard? This idea could be used as an example of the impact of humans on the environment.
Have one student, or a group of students, pick out an object in the room. (This may also be used as an outdoor activity.) The rest of the class, or one student, tries to identify it by asking questions about its properties and the senses that would be used to identify the object. This is a variation on the old radio game show, 20 Questions, a sort of reverse "I spy" game.
Factors: B5, C1, C4, F3, G2
Objectives: 2.3, 3.1
Assessment Techniques: 1, 7c
Common Essential Learnings: Independent Learning, Critical and Creative Thinking. In this game, students learn to generate questions which have a specific purpose, and which are based on information received and processed. The source of this information is the ability to make observations and to generate inferences. Encourage those questions which eliminate groups of objects from consideration and away from questions which ask whether specific objects are "it".
Ask each student to contribute ten to twenty buttons. Have the students work in groups to classify the buttons in as many ways as they can find. Remind them to try to use as many of the senses as possible in finding ways to divide the buttons into groups. Each student could then select one button and describe that button in as much detail as possible.
Factors: A1, B5, C1, C4
Objectives: 2.3, 3.1, 3.3
Assessment Techniques: 1, 3, 5, 7c
Common Essential Learnings: Critical and Creative Thinking, Communication. While the focus of this activity is on classification which develops critical thinking ability, the description of one button requires the students to put observations into words.
Have groups of students devise different ways of making sounds. If you have a variety of supplies such as glass pop bottles, plastic bottles, tin cans, plastic containers, spoons, elastic bands, kazoos, whistles, and animal calls on hand, these will provide students with ideas.
Each group can demonstrate one sound to the class, describing how the sound is produced. Use questions which will encourage students to experiment with some of the sounds. How could the pitch of that sound be changed? What sounds have you heard that are similar to that one? How could you make the new sound more like the similar sound?
Factors: A1, G2
Objectives: 2.1, 2.2, 3.2
Assessment Techniques: 3, 5
Common Essential Learnings: Critical and Creative Thinking. The process of creation or modification of a sound gives students a chance to practice their analytical abilities to determine what causes the sound and their creative abilities in refining and modifying the sound.
Have the students sit at their desks and close their eyes. Ask them to listen very carefully and count the number of different sounds that they hear. Students can then discuss the sounds that they heard. Were there any sounds that they had not noticed before? Ask the students to do this exercise at home in various rooms and when they are outside in different locations. When they are outside, remind them to make sure that it is safe to close their eyes before doing so. When the students return to class, they can report on any interesting or unusual sounds which they heard.
Put equal amounts of a material in each of two cans. (Pop cans work well.) Tape the opening shut. Use materials such as rice, sand, small nails, tacks, water, styrofoam packing 'peanuts' to produce a set of the pairs of cans. Students can shuffle the cans and then match them by shaking them and comparing the sounds.
Use a tape recorder to record sounds from different rooms in the school, from outside, and from in the homes. Play them to the students and ask them to identify each sound. Group the sounds identified by probable location of origin.
Discuss with the students the ways that their sense of hearing can be damaged. Use small wads of absorbent cotton batting to plug their ears, so that their hearing acuity is reduced, and so they understand their loss if their hearing were damaged.
Factors: A1, B5, E2, F3, G2, G3
Objectives: 2.1, 2.2, 2.4, 2.6, 3.2
Assessment Techniques: 3, 8
Common Essential Learnings: Critical and Creative Thinking, Independent Learning. This activity can help students increase their awareness of the diversity of sensory input and what they can learn about their environment through the sounds that they hear. It also encourages them to carry their learning outside the bounds of the classroom.
Go on a sensory scavenger hunt either inside the classroom or outside. If you are using this as an inside activity, you might add a variety of objects not normally found in the room. Find something that is orange (or some other colour), something sweet, something that makes noise, something with a rough texture, and something with an odour. When collecting objects, ask students to be considerate of the environment, and not to collect anything that will cause destruction by its removal. For example, removing a small twig from a large bush or tree may be acceptable, but removing a branch so that the bark of the tree is ripped is not.
Examine all the objects collected. Are there some which would fit into another category than the one for which it was collected? Is there an object which tastes sweet and also has a rough texture, or something with an odour that is also orange in colour?
This experience can be very enriching if conducted in groups of two or three students with one adult. It can also be planned to be done during the different seasons. If a record is kept from one time to the next, the types of discoveries can be compared.
Factors: B1, C4, G2
Objectives: 2.4, 3.2
Assessment Techniques: 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9
Common Essential Learnings: Personal and Social Values and Skills, Critical and Creative Thinking. This activity is appropriate to emphasize respect for the environment through our actions. The activity also illustrates the nature of classification systems.
Supply each group with jars of water which have been coloured with food colouring. Also supply them with mixing jars. Ask them to predict what will happen if two colours of liquid are mixed. Encourage them to try different combinations. Record the results by colouring on a chart.
This activity can be introduced by using a glass pie plate on an overhead projector to show the mixing. The activity can be extended into a visual arts strand activity with paints.
Monitor the groups so that all students get a chance to do the mixing, and so that one student does not dominate the prediction process. Each student should get an opportunity to think about the prediction each time. Rules can be devised to handle these situations.
Factors: B1, C4, G2
Objectives: 2.5
Assessment Techniques: 3, 5, 9
Common Essential Learnings: Critical and Creative Thinking. This activity allows students to see that there are relationships which are consistent, and that repetition of procedures gives reproducible results. It gives the students a situation where they can think on their own, design their procedures, and direct their own research.
Tastes may be compared. Use bitter, sweet, salty, and sour-tasting foods. Identify them by taste. A blindfold may be useful to prevent visual cues. An interesting variation is to ask the students to identify a food by taste when they are holding their noses to prevent them from smelling it. Do different tastes have the same effect on different parts of the tongue? Do special times of the year have their own identifying smells? What words can be used to describe smells?
Factors: A1, B5, C1, D1, F3, G2
Objectives: 1.2, 2.1, 2.3, 2.6
Assessment Techniques: 1, 3, 5, 7c, 8
Common Essential Learnings: Critical and Creative Thinking. This activity can increase the students' awareness of the information which is gathered by our senses.
Ask students to bring, and to identify, objects with a variety of textures. Fabrics, leaves, wood, bark, paper, carpet samples, plastic, and sand are only a few of the possibilities. Many of these can be used in visual art projects to make rubbings and to mount as part of a collage.
A word list with words used to describe textures can be kept. Each word could be illustrated with a sample of an object or substance which displays that characteristic.
Factors: B5, C4, E2, G2
Objectives: 2.3, 2.6, 3.1
Assessment Techniques: 5, 8, 9
Common Essential Learnings: Critical and Creative Thinking. This activity is meant to emphasize the sense of touch. Texture is not often used when describing objects.

Grade 1 Science Core Unit: Senses