Five senses activities for preschoolers

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A lot of the activities I do with my kids are grouped into unit studies. (Hint: You can see all of the unit studies I’ve posted about by going to the “Thematic Units” tab in the main menu up above.)  

My kids get excited when we start a new unit, and lately they have been asking me to do units on particular topics of interest to them.

I’m not quite sure where the interest came from, but my daughter recently started asking me for a unit on the human body.

Wanting to follow her interest, I was happy to oblige. I decided to do some five senses activities as an introduction to our bodies.

In this post I’m sharing some of the five senses activities for preschoolers that I did with my kids as a basic introduction on the first day of this unit. In future posts I’ll share more activities showing how we explored each of the senses in turn.

Note: For more activities and printables on each of the five senses, see my Five Senses Unit Study page. 

The five basic senses through which we perceive the world around us are (1) sight, (2) smell, (3) hearing, (4) taste, and (5) touch.

To introduce this topic, I started by reading the book My Five Senses by Aliki. This book offered a very simple but thorough description of each of the five senses. I especially liked the discussion about how we often use multiple senses at the same time, with some senses being more important at times and less important at other times.

After reading the book, I planned an activity to explore four different objects with each of the five senses. The four objects I selected were a piece of potpourri, a cookie, bells, and sandpaper.

I also created a worksheet to go along with this part of the activity. The worksheet is titled Exploring With My 5 Senses. (Link to download your own copy is below.)

Using this worksheet as a guide, we selected one item at a time and explored it sense by sense. We looked, touched, and smelled. 

We listened and tasted.

As we used each sense to explore the object, we wrote our observations down on the Exploring With My 5 Senses worksheet.

After filling in a worksheet for each object, we counted up the number of senses we had used to explore the object. 

We did not use all five senses to explore all of the objects, as we would not, for example, use our sense of taste to explore sandpaper or our sense of hearing to explore a cookie.

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More five senses resources

More five senses posts from Gift of Curiosity:

• Books about the five senses
• Sense of smell: Smelling bottles
• Sense of taste: Tasting bottles
• Sense of sight: Color grading
• Sense of touch: Thermic glasses
• Sense of touch: Sandpaper grading
• Sense of touch: Identifying 3D shapes by touch
• Sense of hearing: Making music
• My five senses book

Note: For more activities and printables on each of the five senses, see my Five Senses Unit Study page and my Five Senses Pinterest board.