Monday, 16 February 2015

Learning about the senses - Sight


Over the past few weeks we have been exploring the senses; sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. We have had a lot of fun learning about them and doing activities to investigate each one. We have not covered all the sense yet. Here I will be sharing our work on eyes and seeing. 


First, I introduced the whole topic of the senses by asking the children to draw faces on paper plates which we labeled with the different senses.


Here is D's face.


Here is R;s face. He insisted on me drawing spider man's face for him! He has a bit of an obsession with spider man at the moment.


Next, I explained to the children that some people cannot see, they are blind. We talked about how it might feel to be blind and how blind people use braille to read. The children were blindfolded so that they could experience being blind. They found it fun to walk around the room trying not to bump into things. It made them realise how hard it would be if they couldn't see.


D wanders off trying to find her way around without being able to see anything.


I gave the children pictures of the eye to colour in and explained what the different parts of the eye were called.


Then, we spoke about how the pupils get bigger or smaller depending on the amount of light in the environment. We experimented with this by looking at our eyes in bright light and dim light. They found this fascinating.


I showed them some tricks of the eye, explaining how our brain can trick us into thinking we can see things that aren't really there.

I have a series of books about the senses, some of which I picked up at school fairs, that are really good at explaining the senses to young children. They have a lot of activities in them to explore the senses and also lots of simple information. The children are enjoying listening to them. Here is the one about sight:


Finally, D asked me what some animals eyes look like. I wasn't expecting this but it's amazing what questions children can come out with! She wanted to know about butterfly eyes and snail eyes in particular so I found some information for her on the internet and printed off some pictures for her to look at. I didn't know much about animals eyes. It's amazing what we can learn alongside our children.

Check out these posts to find out how we learnt about the sense of touch, hearing, taste and smell.



  1. D asked an interesting question. Did you know that butterflies can see an ultraviolet light?

    1. Yes we did find this out about butterflies when she asked. It's really fascinating isn't it? Butterflies have amazing eyesight, they can see more colours than us!

  2. This is a really good thing to do. I remember doing something similar at school not so long ago.

    1. I don't remember how I learnt about the sense at school but I can't imagine I was blindfolded. lol.

  3. A lovely way to discover more about the senses and how they work. It looks like they had a lot of fun.


  4. This is a great idea, I remember doing something similar when i was younger in a science lesson :)

  5. I love these kind of activities, they always spark great discussions.

  6. Very interesting activity learning about senses. We also love playing educational games at home.


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