Pages

Wednesday 25 December 2013

Exploring the Sense of Taste and Sense of Smell

Even though we spent lots of time for five senses activities, it was so fun and joyful. Most of the activities need my girl to be blind folded; she enjoyed it and asked me to repeat it with neighborhoods children. They shouted, enjoyed and filled our house with laughter and happiness. The sad part is I couldn’t click those moments as I was busy playing with them.
Today, I want to share the activities on last two senses: Sense of Smell and sense of Taste.

Sense of Smell

                Actually, whenever we go for nature study, when I cut vegetables like garlic, ginger, mint or cilantro or when I open a new bottle of coffee powder …. I will definitely ask my child to smell it.
In our backyard, a curry leaf tree and a neem tree are standing side by side. So, initially my girl was little confused with neem and curry leaf. I asked her to smell those leaves.  Even now, if she’s not sure she’ll smell it and confirm it.

 Tender leaves of mango, lemon and eucalyptus have the very nice and strong smell. So, I asked my baby to match the leaves and the fruits of mango, lemon and eucalyptus by smelling it.


Sense of Taste

In English, they are talking only about the primary tastes like sweet, salt, sour and bitter (sometimes they include the fifth taste umami also).  In Tamil, we have 6 tastes (‘Arusuvai’ in Tamil) namely sweet, salt, bitter, sour, pungent (hot) and astringent (almost like umami). I asked my child to taste the content of the six bowls and asked her how it tasted.  I could not click her beautiful expressions especially, when she tasted the lemon and bitter gourd.  Another wonderful activity was to taste the food while closing the nose. Seriously you can feel the difference in the taste when you can’t smell it.

No comments:

Post a Comment