This post is late arriving due to our spring break, but 2 weeks ago in my feild placement I led a science talk related to the five senses with five students in my first grade classroom. The discussion was led by me at the kidney table, and the kids seemed comfortable sharing their ideas-overall I felt it went very well.

In leading this science talk relating to the five senses, I realized before I even began that the students were unfamiliar with the word “senses” or understanding the concept of “the five senses” when I first selected a group of students for the talk and explained that we were going to do a quick talk about our five senses, and was received with a crowd of blank stares and questions such as “what’s that?”. I immediately adapted my plan by deciding to begin with a brief and basic intro by saying “our senses are what we use to observe and find out about things around us. Seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting are together the five senses”, and decided that since they weren’t familiar with the term “senses” to change my question a bit.

I asked the students “What are some ways you would use tasting, touching, your eyes, ears and nose to describe something?” I also added that they could use one or a few of these things to describe something, and that using all at once was not necessary, but also okay to do. At first, the responses were very basic, such as “I smell flowers” and “I taste food” and sometimes off track, like when one child said “I eat” or misunderstood when a child said “I use my mouth to sing” (for which, I scaffolded this to we use our mouth to taste, but we can also use our mouth to make sounds which we hear with our ears…” which then prompted better discussion. The responses also became more in depth. One child said “I hear sounds” and that led to things such as “I hear music, and I can make music” (for which I asked what would we do to make music, which led eventually to the sense of touching) and other responses like “I taste and smell and touch food” and another child adding “and I look at food and I can sometimes hear it like I can hear popcorn when its cooking”. The students were very talkative and engaged and ultimately came up with some great ideas, like “I can see clapping when I clap and I can hear it and feel it too”. I thought that, once adapted and with some prodding and some scaffolding, the discussion was successful.