What's in the Socks?

Today in Year 1 we had a very exciting conclusion to our topic of Senses in science.  The children took part in a carousel of activities investigating the sense of touch.  At first, we discussed that it is our skin that helps us to feel temperature, pressure and texture.  We passed around a frozen bag of peas and a warm boiled egg to develop an understanding that our brain is interpreting the messages from the sense of touch into cold and hot.

There was a ‘feely sock’ table where familiar objects were placed into socks.  The children had to first feel outside the sock and try to guess what object is inside simply by touch. They were then able to put their hand inside the sock to see if it is easier to tell what an object is by direct contact with the skin.  We then took the object out of the sock and use our sense of touch and sight together to identify the object.

To help understand that not all parts of our skin are as sensitive as each other and have different sense receptors the children used ‘split pins’ to test a variety of places on the skin to see if we could distinguish between 1 or 2 points touching.

Part of the investigation was to go around the classroom on a texture hunt to find objects that were hard, rough, bumpy, soft, smooth, etc.  This demonstrated how our skin can differentiate between different kinds of surfaces.

Finally, the children were asked to pair up and play a game called ‘Guess the Number, Shape or Letter’.  Using their finger, they had to draw a number, shape or letter on their partner back and their partner had to work out what had been drawn.

It was a wonderful morning of investigations with all children activity engage learning about how our ski is an amazing sense organ and how it, alongside our eyes, ears, nose and tongue help us make sense of the world around us.