Autumn 1

Our Senses

In science this half term we are investigating our senses. Look out for some of the exciting investigations that we will be carrying out.

We started this unit thinking about what we know about our bodies and our senses. We discussed what are our senses, and how we have nerves running through our bodies that tell our brain what we can see, hear, feel, taste and smell. 

We carried out several investigations exploring our sense of taste. We started the session focussing on which part of the tongue did we taste certain foods/tastes on. We discovered bitter foods were tasted at the back of the tongue, sour at the sides, salty and sweet foods were tasted at the front and things like tomatoes were tasted in the middle of the tongue.

We tasted different crisps to see if we could identify the flavour. We also taste tested different drinks- each drink was a different colour. We thought the drinks were different flavours, but they weren’t, Mrs Mercer was tricking us all of the drinks were lemonade with colouring in. We concluded that sometimes what we see can influence what we think we are tasting. 
 

We have been thinking about our sense of touch. We discussed how our skin has lots of nerve endings and touch receivers. These send messages to our brain about the sensations we feel – cold, hot, smooth, rough, pressure, tickle, itch, pain, vibrations, and more.

We were super busy - identifying and classifying the different touch sensations. We also went on a nature walk looking at what textures we could find in our school environment; we also explored and established that it it is not just our hands that touch- all of our skin has nerve and touch endings and relievers. 

Today we have been exploring our sense of sight. We answer questions such as:

What do we use our eyes for?

What are the different parts of an eye called?

How do we look after our eyes?

Who helps care for our eyes?

We carried out an experiment to see if having two eyes really did help us to see better, we:

•Put a cup in front of your partner and made sure it was about an arms length away from them.

•Asked your partner to close one eye.

•Held one of the coins in the air an arm’s length above the table. Moved it around slowly.

•Told your partner to drop the coin whenever they said, “Drop it!” The idea was for your partner – with one eye closed – to judge when the coin is over the cup so that the coins would drop into the cup.

•Gave our partner five tries with one eye closed, then five tries with both eyes open. 

We discovered that we could see better with two eyes and that we could better judge were something was at.  

We wanted to find out which was the noisiest class in school. We used a data logger to take a decibel reading in each classroom We discussed how we must remain silent was carrying out the test so that we did not influence the decibel reading in the classroom. We discovered the hall was the noisiest room because children were drumming.

We explored our sense of smell. We wanted to find out if we could identify smell’s without  actually seeing what was inside. We then decided to arrange the beakers in the order of our preference. Interestingly most of us preferred the lemon, mint and perfume smells.