sense of sight science experiment

Senses Experiments

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Here are some senses experiments and activities that we have tried and some others that we have on the list to complete.

Sense Of Hearing

We hear because sound waves travel through the air until they hit the ear drum. The sound waves vibrate the eardrum, which in turn, vibrates the bones of the middle ear. These vibrations are transferred to the cochlea, located in the inner ear. The cochlea translates those vibrations into stimuli that the ocular nerve can send to the brain.

It all starts with sound waves and the eardrum. To demonstrate how sound can actually be a physical force, you can do this simple experiment.

Eardrum Experiment

You’ll need:

plastic wrap
20 or so uncooked rice grains
cookie sheet or metal baking pan

Stretch the plastic wrap over the bowl tightly. This is your eardrum. Place 20 or so rice grains on the tightened plastic wrap. Hold the pan or cookie sheet close to the blow, but not touching. Bang on the pan with your hand or large spoon making a loud noise. Watch the rice. It should jump each time you bang on the pan. The sound waves created should vibrate the plastic wrap making the rice move. Sound can be a physical force.

More on Hearing

The Science of Hearing Video

How the Ears Work Video

Operation Ouch- The Eardrum Video

Journey of Sound to the Brain Video

Sense Of Touch

The sense of touch can be used all over the body. We have touch receptors just under our skin that give us lots of information. If you want to test someone’s sense of touch, make a touch box . Get a box with a lid and cut a hole in the side just large enough to fit your hand. Choose various, safe objects of various textures that will fit easily into the box. (cotton ball, rock, rubber ball, tree bark, a sponge, an apple…) Place one object in the box at a time, but don’t let the other person see. Allow the person to put their hand through the hole and try and guess what they are feeling.

More on Touch

Touch Experiments

How your Skin Senses

Sense of Touch Experiments

Sense of Touch Video

Sensation (Touch, Pain, and Temperature) Video

Sense Of Sight

Our eyes work together to allow us to see. To test how they work together you will need:

a paper cup

Set the paper cup on a table about 2 feet in front of your subject who should be sitting in a chair at the table. Have the person cover one eye. Hold a penny in your hand about 1.5 feet above the table. Slowly move your hand in front of, in back of and to the sides of the paper cup. When, the person thinks you are above the cup, have them say “Drop”.

Drop the penny. Do this again with one eye covered and then with both eyes open. Which way is easier? Your eyes work together for proper depth perception. Using both eyes should be easier to determine when the penny was above the cup.

Related Post: Sense of sight lesson and free printable

More on Sight

Sense of Sight Activities

Depth Perception Activity

20/20 Vision Activity

Sense of Sight- How it Works Video

Human Eye Video

What is Color Blindness Video

Vision: Crash Course A&P Video

How We See Color Video

The Visual System Video

Visual Perception Video

Sense Of Taste

The sense of taste comes from taste receptors on your tongue. However, your taste is, also, influenced by your sense of smell. To test this you will need lifesaver candies of various flavors and a partner. Have your partner hold his or her nose. Give the lifesavers one at a time to your partner. Don’t let them see what color it is. Have them try to guess the flavor. Record the answers. Do the experiment again but with the nose unplugged. Which way made it easier to determine the flavor?

More On Taste

Sense of Taste Experiment

Test Your Taste

Test Your Taste Buds

Taste Testing Without Your Sense of Smell

The Sense of Taste Video

Operation Ouch: The Tongue Video

Taste Video

2-Minute Neuroscience: Taste Video

Sense Of Smell

We had fun testing our sense of smell this week. Using small bowls with various odor-producing substances in our house and a blindfold, we conducted our smell test.

The bowls were held under the blindfolded subject’s nose. The subject tried to guess what they were smelling. We used hand soap, hot sauce, pickle juice and an orange.

More on Smell

Smell Experiments

Sense of Smell Experiments

Sniffing Out the Science of Smell

How Good is Your Sense of Smell?

The Sense of Smell Video

How Your Nose Works Video

How to Master Your Sense of Smell Video

Olfactory: Neuroanatomy Video Lab – Brain Dissections Video

2-Minute Neuroscience: Olfaction Video

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Teaching Resources & Guides > Science Lessons > Eyes & Vision

Eyes & Vision

Do you know how your vision works?

Read on to find out about the incredible properties of the eye–and how its features affect your vision.

Eyes & Vision Science Lesson

Eye anatomy.

The human eye is one of the the most complex and sophisticated sensory organs in the body.

Its unique automatic focusing system outstrips that of any camera, and its light sensitivity is ten million times greater than the best film designed so far! Before taking a look at how the eye works, let’s start with a basic overview of how it is built.

The outside layer of the eye is made up of the sclera and the cornea.

The sclera is the firm white tissue that covers all of the eye except the very front. It helps maintain the shape of the eye and protects the inner parts.

The cornea is the transparent portion at the center front part of the eye that allows light through.

A thin outer mucous membrane called the conjunctiva covers the inside of the eyelids, the cornea, and the front portion of the sclera. It helps lubricate the eye.

The middle layer of the eye contains oxygen- and nutrient-rich blood vessels, most of which are located in the layer of tissue called the choroid .

Near the front of the eye is the ciliary body , a group of muscles and ligaments that attach to the lens. These muscles change the shape of the lens as they relax and contract.

The final component of this layer is the iris , a group of muscles that controls how much light enters the eye by adjusting the opening, or pupil . The iris contains pigments that determine your eye-color.

When you look at a person’s eye, you can see parts from each of the first two layers: the “white” of the eye is the sclera, the front transparent part is the cornea, the iris is the colored part, and the pupil is the dark hole in the center.

The eye’s inner layer is composed of the retina : thin tissue that contains blood vessels and light-sensitive photoreceptor cells called rods and cones.

Every human eye contains about 120 million rods and 7 million cones.

The rods are very sensitive to low-level light, but they cannot distinguish color.

Cones need much more light to function than rods do, but they provide color information and sharp detail.

You may have noticed that in dim light color looks much less vibrant; that is because the rods that help you see in the dark are more or less “color-blind.” The retina also contains a dark pigment called melanin (also found in skin and hair cells) – this reduces reflection of light when it enters your eye.

The blood vessels and the optic nerve (the nerve that conducts electrical impulses to the brain; see the following article to learn more) connect to the retina at a spot called the optic disc .

On this disc there are no rods and cones; this is your blind spot. You don’t usually notice your blind spot, because your two eyes work together to “cover up” each other’s blind spot.

The macula is a small spot in the center of your retina. On this spot is a small pit called the fovea . When light is focused on this spot we get the sharpest image, because the fovea contains very tightly-packed photoreceptor cells. Macular degeneration is a common eye disease that is caused by the deterioration of the macula and results in partial blindness.

The three layers fill only a small part of the eye; the large middle area isn’t empty, though! The area between the cornea and the lens is filled with a transparent liquid material called the aqueous humor. The area between the lens and the retina contains a clear gel-like substance called the vitreous humor. Both of these humors help give shape to the eye and are part of the focusing process.

Your eye is a very delicate organ. The sclera and cornea protect the inner parts of the eye, but there are other protective parts as well.

Most obvious are your eyelids. With the eyelashes , your eyelids help keep outside particles from getting in your eye.

They also help spread tears , which keep the eye moist and wash away anything that gets past the eyelids. Tears are produced in the lacrimal glands and contain antibodies and anti-bacterial enzymes. The tears that your lacrimal glands produce regularly are drained away into the nasal cavity.

When you produce extra tears, though, they will spill out – this is called crying!

How Vision Works

In order to see, your eye must focus light on the retina, convert the light into electrical impulses, and send those impulses to your brain to be interpreted.

It is an amazing and complex process, but you do it constantly without even trying!

Focusing the light. When light bounces off an object and reaches the eye, it must be bent so that its rays arrive at the retina in focus.

Four different surfaces bend the light as it enters the eye: the cornea, the aqueous humor, the lens, and the vitreous humor.

When all four of these bend the light appropriately, you see a focused image of the object.

The eye can focus objects at different distances because the ciliary muscles push and pull to make the lens change shape. When you look at an object that is far away, the ciliary muscles relax and the lens has a flattened shape.

When you look at an object that is close by, the ciliary muscles are contracted and the lens is thickened. This is one of the features that makes the eye superior to any manmade camera.

To adjust a camera lens for the distance of an object, you must move the whole lens forward or back. If our eyes worked the same way, we would need long tubes sticking out of our eyes so the lenses could move back and forth.

Instead, our lenses just change shape to adjust for the distance of an object. This takes up much less room, and is probably more attractive!

In addition to focusing the light, your eye can control how much light gets in.

The colored part of your eye, called the iris, controls the size of the pupil, the opening that lets light through.

In dim light, the iris will cause your pupil to expand, allowing as much light as possible into your eye. In bright light, the iris causes the pupil to contract so that less light can enter.

Converting the light. What happens when the focused light reaches your retina? It triggers a complex chemical reaction in the light-sensitive rod and cone cells.

Rods contain a chemical called rhodopsin , or “visual purple,” and cones contain chemicals called color pigments.

These chemicals undergo a transformation that results in electrical impulses being sent to the brain through the optic nerve.

Interpreting in the brain. When the electrical impulses arrive in the visual cortex of the brain, the brain analyzes the color and light information from the rods and cones and interprets them as light.

The brain flips the image (the light was projected on your retina upside down) and fills in for the blind spot if necessary (read more on this in the science project below).

All this happens almost instantaneously, allowing you to read a book or enjoy a beautiful sunset. Some of the information from the retina is sent to the visual reflex system in your brain. This allows you to react quickly to visual threats.

If you see something coming toward your head, your visual reflex system processes this and causes you to duck before you have time to think about it!

Eyes & Vision Science Projects

Eye chart vision test.

A Snellen eye chart is used to determine how “normal” your vision is. It sets a standard for what most people should be able to see when they stand 20 feet away from the chart.

20/20 vision just means that when you stand 20 feet away from a Snellen eye chart, you see what a normal human being can see.

If you see 20/40, that means that when you stand 20 feet away from the chart, you see what a normal person sees standing 40 feet away from it. The higher the second number, the worse your vision is. 20/200 (you see at 20 feet what a normal person sees at 200) is the number for legal blindness in the United States.

20/20 vision isn’t perfect, it’s just “normal.” You can have better vision than 20/20. If you have 20/10 you see at 20 feet what most people see at 10. Some animals, like hawks, might have 20/2 vision!

You can use our Snellen eye chart * to compare vision within your family or with your friends.

(This will only give you an approximate idea of your vision. Your optometrist has much more precise tools to find out exactly how well you can see.)

Each line of the chart is labeled on the left side. The second to last line is 20/20.

Tape the eye chart to a wall, making sure it is in plenty of light. Stand twenty feet away from the chart and begin reading each line.

Have a family member or friend watch to see that you are reading each letter correctly. The last line that you are able to read will give you an approximate idea of your vision.

If you can read the very bottom line, your vision is 20/10! Now try covering one eye and just testing the other one. Is one eye better than the other?

Have all of your family members try reading the chart. Do some of you have better vision than others? If you wear glasses, what is your vision with them on and what is it without them?

* Instructions for downloading : The Snellen Eye Chart PDF is 11″ x 17″, so to print correctly you will need to set your print options to “tile.” Printer choices will vary, but you should do something similar to this. Open the PDF and choose Print. Under the page scaling options, select “tile all pages.” This should print the chart on four sheets of paper. You will need to trim the edges so the pieces match up, and then tape or glue them together.

(You can also order an already-printed 11″ x 17″ copy of our Snellen Eye Chart.)

Blind Spot Experiments

The spot where your optic nerve connects to your retina is called the optic disc. There are no photoreceptor cells on this disc, so when an image hits that part of your retina, you can’t see it.

This is your blind spot. You don’t notice this blind spot in every-day life, because your two eyes work together to cover it up.

To find it, draw a filled-in, 1/4″-sized square and a circle three or four inches apart on a piece of white paper.

Hold the paper at arm’s length and close your left eye. Focus on the square with your right eye, and slowly move the paper toward you. When the circle reaches your blind spot, it will disappear!

Try again to find the blind spot for your other eye. Close your right eye and focus on the circle with your left eye. Move the paper until the square disappears.

What happened when the circle disappeared? Did you see nothing where the circle had been?

No, when the circle disappeared, you saw a plain white background that matched the rest of the sheet of paper.

This is because your brain “filled in” for the blind spot – your eye didn’t send any information about that part of the paper, so the brain just made the “hole” match the rest.

Try the experiment again on a piece of colored paper. When the circle disappears, the brain will fill in whatever color matches the rest of the paper.

The brain doesn’t just match colored backgrounds. It can also make other changes to what you see. Try drawing two filled-in rectangles side by side with a circle in between them. A few inches to the right of this, draw a square.

Close your right eye and focus your left eye on the square. Move the paper until the circle disappears and the two separated bars become one bar.

How did that happen? The circle in between the bars fell on your blind spot. When it disappeared, the brain filled in for the missing information by connecting the two bars!

Here is one final experiment with your blind spot. In this instance the brain doesn’t match the blind spot with its immediate white background, but instead with the pattern surrounding it.

Draw a line down the center of your page. On one side draw a small square and on the other draw rows of circles. Color the center circle red and all the others blue.

Close your left eye and look at the square with your right eye. As you move the paper, the red circle should disappear and be replaced by a blue one!

Technology: Improving Eyesight

The general design of the human eye is practically flawless – but each individual eye isn’t.

If you are using contacts or glasses to read this article, you know that your eyes aren’t perfect.

Perhaps you are nearsighted and can’t see objects that are far away very well.

Or maybe you are farsighted and have trouble seeing things close-up. Both of these conditions occur because of the shape of the eyeball.

If your eyeball is too short, the light rays will focus the image behind your retina, instead of on it. This produces farsightedness. If your eyeball is too long, the light rays focus the image in front of the retina, making you nearsighted.

The technology of vision correction has developed over centuries.

The first known eyeglasses were made in the 13th century out of quartz set into bone, metal, or leather.

Eventually the technology for glass-blowing allowed a fine enough quality of glass to be used for lenses.

The biggest problem with these early glasses was keeping them on. It took almost 400 years before someone developed the side arms to rest on the ears!

Most people bought ready-made glasses that would have helped their vision without correcting it precisely.

For example, Benjamin Franklin had two pair of glasses, one for near and one for far. He got tired of changing them, so he cut the lenses in half and repositioned them so that he could see both near and far using the same glasses – the first bifocals!

With the advance of technology, vision-testing equipment has become more and more precise.

Now to obtain a pair of glasses, you must go to an optometrist who will determine exactly what type and strength of lenses you need.

Concave lenses are used for nearsightedness because they bend light away from the center – this stops the light from focusing too far in front of the retina.

Convex lenses are used for farsightedness because they bend light toward the center, causing the light to focus sooner so the image is not focused behind your retina.

Lenses can also be made that will correct other problems in the eye, such as astigmatism , which is an irregular curvature of the cornea.

Contact lenses are a popular alternative to eyeglasses. These lenses fit directly on the cornea, where they “float” on a layer of tears.

They were under experimentation as early as the mid-19th century, though quality and comfort left much to be desired. Now millions of people in the United States use either soft or hard lenses.

Soft contact lenses are made of flexible, water-absorbing plastics. They are more comfortable to wear than hard lenses, which are made of more rigid plastic that does not form to the eye as well. Hard lenses, on the other hand, produce a sharper image.

Some people want a more permanent solution to their vision problems. In recent years, procedures such as LASIK (laser-assisted in-situ keratomileusis) surgery have been developed to remove the need for external lenses like glasses and contacts.

While external lenses change how the light is bent so that it focuses on your retina, laser surgery reshapes the cornea itself.

The process involves a tightly focused beam of ultraviolet light, called an excimer laser. The surgeon first uses a sharp scalpel to cut a flap in the top layer of the cornea, then directs the laser into the middle layer.

As the laser pulses onto this surface, it vaporizes a microscopic portion of the cornea. By controlling the number and location of the pulses, the surgeon controls how much of the cornea is removed.

Noteworthy Scientist: Charles Bell (1774-1842)

Do you ever wonder how great artists can paint a human face that looks perfectly realistic? One of Charles Bell’s contributions to art was an anatomy textbook especially for artists, called Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting .

Charles Bell was an artist himself, as well as a surgeon and anatomist. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of a Church of England minister. His older brother John was a surgeon, author, and teacher of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh.

Studying with his brother, Bell developed both his artistic talent and his medical knowledge. After he graduated from the University with a degree in medicine, Bell assisted in teaching his brother’s anatomy class and publishing a four-volume Anatomy textbook.

Eventually Bell moved to London where he did extensive research on nerves, wrote many books and treatises, opened a school of anatomy, and worked as a surgeon.

In 1815 he cared for the wounded after the bloody battle of Waterloo, his skill in surgery holding him in good stead.

His battlefield experience led him to create illustrations of gunshot wounds to be used by surgeons.

Bell’s research on the brain and nerves proved foundational for modern neurology. He determined that nerves only sent information one way: some took sensory information to the brain, and some took commands from the brain to the rest of the body. He also traced nerves from special sensory organs (such as the eye) to specific parts of the brain.

Through all his research and medical illustration, Bell recognized the hand of a Creator. In 1836 he was invited to contribute to a collection of works “On the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation.”

He agreed, and wrote a treatise called The Hand; its Mechanism and Vital Endowment, as Evincing Design .

Bell was knighted by King William IV in 1831, and in 1835 he accepted a position as professor of surgery and returned to Scotland.

He continued to work in his field up until his death in 1842.

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11 Fun Sense of Sight Activities for Preschoolers

By: Author Tanja McIlroy

Posted on Last updated: 5 June 2024

Categories Activities for Preschoolers & Kindergarteners

Need some fun, hands-on ideas for sense-of-sight activities you can do with preschoolers at home or in class?

The best way for young kids to learn about their senses is to participate in rich learning experiences through play.

Here are 11 simple ideas.

1. Read & Discuss: Arlo Needs Glasses

Arlo Needs Glasses by Barney Saltzberg is an interactive picture book that introduces the practical topics of eye checkups and getting glasses to help with sight when needed.

Children who wear glasses can tell about their related experiences. Other kids could name friends and family members who wear glasses.

2. Arts & Crafts: Design Glasses

After reading Arlo Needs Glasses , give kids an opportunity to design their own glasses, either for Arlo or for themselves! Here are several options for a sense of sight craft:

On a printed (or child-drawn) picture of Arlo or of themselves, kids use crayons and markers to add fancy eyeglasses of their own design.
Many child-sized eyeglass templates are available online. Print them on plain paper or cardboard for kids to add their own designs and then cut.

3. Read, Discuss & Experience: It Looked Like Spilt Milk

It Looked Like Spilt Milk by Charles G. Shaw is a repetitive picture book that addresses the concept of visual perception .

Try reading the book outdoors on a partly cloudy day or moving outside after sharing. Kids can look for clouds in the sky that remind them of familiar objects.

Mom and child reading a book on the grass

4. Art: Design a Class/Family Book

Great kids’ books such as It Looked Like Spilt Milk can often lead to art activities.

After sharing this book and possibly viewing clouds in the sky, challenge the children to design pages for a new book.

They can cut or tear white printer or construction paper into shapes, then decide what real-life objects they look like.

Get kids to glue the shape onto dark blue paper to resemble the model book. Then write in the words for your kids by following the pattern established in the book.

Compile all the pages for a new class or family read-aloud!

5. Sing The Corner Grocery Store by Raffi

Share this fun song about things someone could think they see if they have forgotten their glasses!

Here are the lyrics:

There was cheese, cheese, walkin’ on its knees In the store, in the store There was cheese, cheese, walkin’ on its knees In the corner grocery store

My eyes are dim, I cannot see I have not brought my specs with me I have not brought my specs with me

There were plums, plums, twiddling their thumbs In the store, in the store There were plums, plums, twiddling their thumbs In the corner grocery store

There was corn, corn, blowin’ on a horn In the store, in the store There was corn, corn, blowin’ on a horn In the corner grocery store

There were beans, beans, trying on some jeans In the store, in the store There were beans, beans, trying on some jeans In the corner grocery store

There was more, more, just inside the door In the store, in the store There was more, much more, just inside the door In the corner grocery store

6. Play: Blindfold Games

Make blindfolds out of old T-shirt material so kids can each have their own.

Taking part in various activities while blindfolded helps children focus on the importance of sight and their other senses in everyday life.

Play the classic Blind Man’s Buff game or try one of these variations.

Partner Block Building

One child is the guide while the blindfolded child is the builder. The guide gives step-by-step instructions on how to construct a particular type of building.

The blindfolded child does their best to build as directed, relying merely on hearing and touch.

Pin the Eyes on the Owl

One child is blindfolded at a time and attempts to affix the large eyes on the poster board picture of an owl.

For added group involvement, allow the other children to give oral directions to the blindfolded child, such as up, down, left and right.

Find the Animals

In pairs, one child is an animal of their choosing and the other child is the animal caretaker, who is blindfolded.

Indoors or outside, the “animal” makes noises fitting with their chosen creature, while the “caretaker” wearing the blindfold tries to locate them by relying on their sense of hearing.

7. Play: See Colours

Each child chooses a different coloured token. With a time limit, they are then tasked with collecting as many objects of the same colour as possible for their buckets from around the room, home or yard.

8. Exercise: Sunglass Stroll

Offer a wide selection of fun sunglasses for kids to wear on a neighbourhood walk.

Challenge them to pay close attention to things they see during the walk to dictate a list later. These could include various buildings, animals and things that grow.

9. Experiment: See Like a Pirate

Pirates are famously known to wear eye patches. Share the book The Pirate of Kindergarten by George Ella Lyon with your children. The little girl in the book experiences double vision and must wear an eye patch to see correctly.

Since most kids have single vision, how does wearing an eye patch affect their sight? Ask kids to predict and then let them try it while attempting to find toy gold coins hidden around the room.

Discuss the experience in circle time. Did things look any different while wearing the patch?

10. Experiment: Sight Station

After explaining each item’s use, offer a selection of sight instruments for kids to experience how they affect their sight.

Possibilities include magnifying glasses, binoculars, microscopes and old eyeglasses.

Child placing a pair of adult sunglasses on her head.

11. Experiment: Visual Memory

Build visual memory by showing children a selection of small objects on a tray and then covering them. Challenge kids to name as many of the objects as possible.

Discuss: why were some objects easier for certain children to remember than others?

Possibilities include colour/brightness, familiar/favourite object or comparative size.

Enjoy trying these sense-of-sight ideas and activities.

Here are more sensory station ideas to stimulate all the senses.

Blindfolded child playing a game. Text reads

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Inventors of Tomorrow

Hands-on science and engineering education for kids age 3 – 6, sight – kids’ science activities.

We studied all five senses in one two hour session. But each one could be a week’s theme in itself. Or if you’re in a homeschool or in a five day a week school setting, you could do one sense per day.

Free Exploration Stations

Light table and Lite Brite: We had a homemade light table (plastic tub with Christmas lights in it) and we put on it colorful plastic cups and clear plastic cups they could decorate with markers for imaginary people play.

Visual gradient : Take 5 – 8 matching test tubes or glasses. Fill with water. Put one drop of food coloring (or liquid watercolor) in the first one, two drops in the second one and so on. Then mix up, and ask kids to re-sort them in order from lightest to darkest.

How does using your sense of sight help you use your other senses ? On our five senses day, we also had some exercises of: can you recognize this taste without looking at what you’re tasting? Can you recognize the smell without looking in the container to see the item? Can you recognize a sound in a shaker without opening it to look?

Art projects

Thaumatropes : A thaumatrope is a Victorian toy, where there are two images on two sides of a card. It is mounted on a string (like a button spinner ) or on a straw and when it spins, showing first one side, then the next, they seem to spin together to create a single image. This is due to persistence of vision . Instructions here: https://inventorsoftomorrow.com/2021/03/17/thaumatropes/

Spy glasses : We made some “binoculars” with toilet paper tubes, where we taped two tubes together, added strings for hanging them around our necks on the hike and decorated them. We also used just toilet paper tubes. We went for a hike in the woods. When you look at the world through a focused tube, it focuses your attention very differently, and you see things in a very different light than normal. (Really, adults… try this! It’s intriguing how it changes the details you see.)

Kaleidoscopes : We made kaleidoscopes by taking paper towel tubes, wrapping in wrapping paper (to make them prettier – optional). Then we took Dixie cups we’d cut the bottom off of so you could look through them. We taped saran wrap over one end, filled with some decorative stones, then taped saran wrap over the other end, then taped the cup onto the end of the tube. (Sorry I didn’t get a picture of a final product!)

Ways to improve this project for the future: I think it would have worked better to use the small plastic dip containers with lids rather than Dixie cups. They would have been sturdier and held items better than the saran wrap did. Also, I think lightweight confetti type items would be better than the heavy glass stones. (Note: if you want to make a more sophisticated kaleidoscope with a triangular mirror in the center to reflect the items, see Inna’s Creations’ post and minieco.co.uk )

Guided Activity

Camouflage : We hid plastic dinosaurs in the woods. We were careful to hide the yellow ones near yellow fallen leaves, the green amongst holly and salal, and we hid the velociraptor – the one with stripes on its back under the sword fern.

On our hike, we reminded them of last week’s discussion of habitats . We explained how another way animals adapt to their habitats is they develop similar coloring to their surrounding so they’re harder to spot. We asked questions like “Can you see a polar bear in the snow? How about a giraffe? Could you see a giraffe in the snow? Where would be a better place for a giraffe to hide?” Then, we had them seek out the dinosaurs. They were surprisingly well hidden! Even the adults who hid them had a hard time finding them all! (Hint: make sure you count how many you put out, and take a picture of them! We’d found nine out of ten and I couldn’t even remember which one was missing till I looked at the picture. Then I showed the picture to the kids and then they found the velociraptor under the sword fern.)

What if your sense of sight didn’t work ? There are lots of things you could do to explore this question with children. Turn off the lights, or blindfold them. Then:

Play “listening tag”. Put the blindfolded child in the middle of a circle. Ask the other children to be quiet. When you point at a child, they talk. The one in the middle points to where they think the talking person is. Then point to another child, and so on.
Play “wet rag on a stick.” If it’s a hot summer day, it’s hard to beat the loud, wet fun of this game. Make a circle of kids holding hands. Put a child in the middle with a blindfold. Give them a stick and then hang a sopping wet washcloth off the end of it. The circle of kids circles around the child shouting, calling their name, taunting (nicely). Then the child decides who to try to nail with the rag, and when ready, flings it. If they miss (or the kids dodge) they keep the blindfold on. If they hit, the kid who got hit is now it. (And is now sopping wet….)
Let them explore a safe obstacle course.
Have another child lead them around a room or outdoors.
Have them touch common objects and see if they can identify what they are touching. Or play instruments/noisemakers and see if they can identify what you’re using. Or have them smell things. Or taste things… All these things will illustrate how we use all our senses together to create a more nuanced view of what we’re experiencing.

Where’s Waldo books or I Spy books give children a chance to practice spying things and looking at details closely.
There are LOTS of books on the 5 Senses. I review them all here .

Sight day could be a great day to bring in some rainbow activities or have fun with light and shadow . For lots more ideas, including optical illusions, look here .

Watch this video on How Animals See the World Differently than humans.

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5 Science Experiments Where Children Use Their Sense To Observe

Curriculum & Skills

January 31, 2022 by Valerie Kirk

Hands-on learning taps into something teachers have always known: children learn best when they are actively engaged with the learning activity. What better way to keep them engaged—and learning—than with a hands-on science experiment?

Doing science experiments also helps improve children’s observation skills, which leads to observational learning, an ability that will help them throughout school—and life. In fact, observation is a critical part of the first step of the scientific method, which begins when students ask questions about things they can observe.

To spark your student’s curiosity about science and help them develop observation skills, encourage them to use their five senses. By seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting something, they are actively engaged in learning through observation.

Here are five science experiments where children can use their senses to learn through observation. As an added bonus, these science experiments follow the scientific method, making them great science fair projects! Learning the scientific method will help prepare them for the more rigorous high school science classes and for a future STEM-based career .

1. Glitter Germ Experiment  

While glitter may be enemy No. 1 for many homeschool and online school parents, it is great to teach kids about how germs spread—and how to form healthy hand-washing habits. In the Glitter Germ Experiment, glitter represents germs that students can’t normally see. Kids will test to see what washes the glitter germs away—water, hand soap, dish soap, or a dry paper towel. This experiment taps into your student’s sense of sight; they can visually observe how the glitter reacts to each method of cleaning.

Get the Experiment

2. Musical Water Glasses  

The hands-on Musical Water Glasses activity for elementary or middle school students incorporates the elements of STEAM learning—science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. Students use different-sized water glasses filled with different measurements of water to learn about sound waves—and making music! In this experiment, children learn through observation using their sense of hearing.

3. Mystery Smells

In the Mystery Smells science experiment, children use their sense of smell to determine what is inside containers or a paper bag. Items include things ranging from cleaning supplies to fruit to mud! Kids learn about the power of smell and how easy—or hard—it is to identify everyday things using just their sense of smell.

Get the Experiment

4. Does Food Coloring Affect Taste?

This is a fun science experiment using your student’s sense of taste. The purpose of this science experiment is to determine if the color of something affects a person’s perception of its taste. Food coloring is added to apple juice, and experiment participants are asked to say what each colored drink is. Students will observe how the sense of sight may—or may not—affect the sense of taste.

5. Brain Box

Like the Mystery Smell experiment, the Brain Box science experiment involves putting everyday objects in a cardboard box or pillowcase. Experiment participants then write down how many objects they can identify. First, they try to identify objects with a sock on their hand, then without the sock, and then when the objects are revealed, they can use their hands and eyes to identify the objects. Children use their observation skills to learn about their sense of touch.

More At-Home Science Projects

If you are looking for more science activities to help extend your student’s learning and build their observation skills, check out the Connections Academy Resource Hub , which is full of STEM activities , including making your own fossils and building a Rube Goldberg machine .

Did you know that these at-home science experiments are similar to lessons your student would complete in online school? If you enjoyed spending time with your student working on these science experiments and supporting their learning, maybe online school is right for you? Join a Connections Academy information session to learn more. It’s never too late to make the switch to a new school experience.

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Sense of Sight: Part 1.

Eye Anatomy and Function Developed by Marjorie A. Murray, Ph.D.; Neuroscience for Kids Staff Writer |

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Students learn some ways to investigate the sense of sight, and find out how to plan and conduct their own experiments.	for these activities: 45 minutes for introducing and discussing the activity, 45 minutes for the "Class Experiment;" and 45 minutes for Explor Time and "Try Your Own Experiment."

Our visual systems perform all kinds of amazing jobs, from finding constellations in the night sky, to picking out just the right strawberry in the supermarket, to tracking a fly ball into a waiting glove. How do our eyes and brains recognize shape, movement, depth, and color? How do we so easily pick a friend's face out of a crowd, yet get fooled by optical illusions? In this first of three units on the Sense of Sight, we consider the anatomy and physiology of the eye, especially the retina, and the initial pathways visual information takes to the brain. Part 2 discusses how various aspects of a visual scene are processed at higher levels, and Part 3 delves into color vision.

Most animals and many plants are photosensitive; that is, they can detect different light intensities. Some organisms accomplish this with single cells or with simple eyes that do not form images but do allow the organism to react to light by moving toward or away from it. In order for an eye to transmit more information about the world, however, it must have a way of forming an image, a representation of the scene being viewed.

The mammalian eyeball (Figure 2) is an organ that focuses a visual scene onto a sheet of specialized neural tissue, the retina, which lines the back of the eye. Light from a scene passes through the cornea, pupil, and lens on its way to the retina. The cornea and lens focus light from objects onto photoreceptors, which absorb and then convert it into electrical signals that carry information to the brain. Two pockets of transparent fluid nourish eye tissues and maintain constant eye shape: these are the aqueous and vitreous humors, through which the light also passes. The lens projects an inverted image onto the retina in the same way a camera lens projects an inverted image onto film; the brain adjusts this inversion so we see the world in its correct orientation. To control the images that fall upon our retinas, we can either turn our heads or turn our eyes independently of our heads by contracting the extraocular muscles, six bands of muscles that attach to the tough outside covering, or sclera, of the eyeball and are innervated by cranial nerves. See Table 1 for a brief list of eyeball components and their functions.

The cornea and lens bend or refract light rays as they enter the eye, in order to focus images on the retina. The eye can change the extent to which rays are bent and thus can focus images of objects that are various distances from the observer, by varying the curvature of the lens. The ciliary muscle accomplishes this by contracting to lessen tension on the lens and allowing it to round up so it can bend light rays more, or relaxing for the opposite effect. This ciliary muscle is smooth or non-voluntary muscle-you cannot "decide" to contract or relax it as you do the skeletal muscle in a finger or facial muscle.

Refractive errors occur when the bending of light rays by the cornea and lens does not focus the image correctly onto the retina. An eyeball that is too long or too short for the optics of the cornea and lens or an irregularly shaped cornea can cause refractive errors, which include myopia (near-sightedness), hyperopia (far-sightedness), and astigmatism. Myopia results either when the eyeball is too long or when the cornea is curved too much, and the focused image falls in front of the retina. Hyperopia is the opposite, with the image falling behind the retina. Astigmatism results from a cornea that is not spherical. Fortunately, most refractive errors can be corrected with prescription lenses.

TABLE 1. PARTS OF THE EYE
FUNCTION
Aqueous humor	clear watery fluid found in the anterior chamber of the eye; maintains pressure and nourishes the cornea and lens
Vitreous humor	clear, jelly-like fluid found in the back portion of the eye: maintains shape of the eye and attaches to the retina
Blind spot	small area of the retina where the optic nerve leaves the eye: any image falling here will not be seen
Ciliary muscles	involuntary muscles that change the lens shape to allow focusing images of objects at different distances
Cornea	transparent tissue covering the front of the eye: does not have blood vessels; does have nerves
Cones	photoreceptors responsive to color and in bright conditions; used for fine detail
Rods	photoreceptors responsive in low light conditions; not useful for fine detail
Fovea	central part of the macula that provides sharpest vision; contains only cones
Iris	circular band of muscles that controls the size of the pupil. The pigmentation of the iris gives "color" to the eye. Blue eyes have the least amount of pigment; brown eyes have the most
Lens	transparent tissue that bends light passing through the eye: to focus light, the lens can change shape
Macula	small central area of the retina that provides vision for fine work and reading
Optic nerve	bundle of over one million axons from ganglion cells that carry visual signals from the eye to the brain
Pupil	hole in the center of the eye where light passes through
Choroid	Thin tissue layer containing blood vessels, sandwiched between the sclera and retina; also, because of the high melanocytes content, the choroid acts as a light-absorbing layer.
Retina	layer of tissue on the back portion of the eye that contains cells responsive to light (photoreceptors)
Sclera	tough, white outer covering of the eyeball; extraocular muscles attach here to move the eye

Science experiments lend themselves to a "let's see what happens" atmosphere, and a good way to take advantage of this is to provide Explore Time or Brainstorming Time. Many labs benefit from Explore Time, when students are free to investigate lab supplies that are out on a table, and begin to think about how to use them in experiments. Because of their curiosity, students usually "play" with lab materials first even in a more traditional lab, so taking advantage of this natural behavior is usually successful. Explore Time can occur either before the Class Experiment or before the "Try Your Own Experiment" activity, depending on the plans of the teacher.

To use Explore Time before the Class Experiment, set the lab supplies out on a bench before giving instructions for the experiment. Ask the students how these materials could be used to investigate the sense of sight in light of the previous lecture and discussion, then offer 10 or 15 minutes for investigating the materials. Give some basic safety precautions, then circulate among students to answer questions and encourage hypotheses. After students gain an interest in the materials and subject, lead the class into the Class Experiment with the Teacher Demonstration and help them to formulate the Lab Question. (See the accompanying Teacher Guide.)

Alternately, conduct the Class Experiment in a more traditional way, and give students Explore Time before the "Try Your Own Experiment" activity.

WWW references: from Neuroscience for Kids and from Neuroscience for Kids from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

By reaching Project 2061 Benchmarks for Science Literacy, students will also fulfill many of the National Science Education Standards and individual state standards for understanding the content and applying the methods of science. Because the Benchmarks most clearly state what is expected of students, they are used here. The Benchmarks are now on-line at:

The Benchmarks are listed by chapter, grade level, and item number; for instance, 1A, 6-8, #1 indicates Chapter 1, section A, grades 6-8, benchmark 1.

The PROCESS OF INQUIRY used in the Eye and its Connections activities will help students reach the following summarized Benchmarks:

1A, 6-8, #1
When similar investigations give different results, the scientific challenge is to judge whether the differences are trivial or significant, and it often takes further studies to decide.

1B, 6-8, #1

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Sense of Sight – A Few Experiments Worth Seeing

October 5, 2018
by ItsySparks
Mini Scientists

In studying about our Fives Senses, we have enjoyed exploring our sense of touch , hearing , and taste . Our most recent exploration has been with our sense of sight. We rely very much on our sight to move around and see things every day. Our eyes are very complex in how they work. Home Science Tools gives a great explanation: How do our eyes work? The little dark circle in the center of each of your eyes lets light in. It is called a pupil. If you are in a dark place where no lights at all are on, can you see anything? No, you can’t because our eyes need light to be able to see! Once the light goes in, it hits a part inside at the back of your eye that is very sensitive to light. This part is called the retina. When light touches the retina, it makes an upside-down picture of whatever you are looking at. A large nerve called the optic nerve carries the image to your brain where it gets turned around so that you see it the right way instead of upside-down!

We also found a great video for kids to explain how the sense of sight works too. Click here to view . We did a few experiments to make us think about how we use our eyes every day. Our first experiment was writing with a blindfold on. He realized right away how challenging it was to write without using our sense of sight.

Next we looked at different objects. We used our sense of sight to describe the color and shape of each object. We then played a fun game where we placed all of the objects on a piece of paper. I put the blindfold over his eyes. I removed one object. Then he had to remember what he saw and tell me which object went missing.

Our last experiment was to walk slowly with our blindfold on. This was done carefully, with adult supervision, so if you decide to try this one, make sure your little one walks very slowly!

A lot of conversation came out of these experiments. We talked about how some people have impaired vision and use glasses to help see better. We talked about how some people have complete loss of vision and are blind. I explained about how blind people or partially sighted people use braille to read and write. You can read more about braille and the braille alphabet here .

Our eyes are fascinating indeed, in the way that they work. We rely on our eyes very much, and also from the very moment we wake up! They sure do a lot a lot of great things for us and help us see many wonders of life and the world – make sure to take good care of them!

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45 Science Activities for Kids to Learn the 5 Senses

What kids can learn about the sense of seeing?

9 Kids Science Experiments about Light will teach them why and how we can see, and some interesting facts about light. Kids would love to see light reflection and prism. But be prepare to explain the why and science behind the magic light display. It is also necessary to teach light and energy, and invisible light, such as UV lights.

Talking about light will easily leads into color. These 7 science experiments about colors will help kids understand the science behind the colors. Why different objects have different colors? How is colors shown on computer screen different from colors shown on paper? How our eyes perceive colors? What happens when you mix colors?

After light and color, an easy transition is the sense of hearing and sound. How do you explain to kids that sound is certain type of wave? These 7 fun science activities will help kids see the sound , and get an intuitive understanding of it via visualizing the sound wave. Wait to see your kids’ surprised faces! A fun way to explore sound is via music. Kids will learn so much about sound features via music, such as pitch, frequency. Do you know sound wave is different from light wave? How to make your sound louder?

How can you smell? Does your mouth help when you smell? Try these 7 science experiments for kids to learn smell . Find out some fun ways to test every one’s sense of smell? Does every one smell the same smell? Does everyone like the same smell? Why? There are so many different ways to test the sense of smells, and they are all fun and easy.

There are tastes we like, and tastes we don’t like. Why can we taste? Can you tell the food taste holding your nose? Try some fun science activities to learn about taste , and find out how sensitive are you to different tastes. Do you know different parts of the tongue have different sensitivity to different taste? How can you find out through a science experiment?

The last is the sense of touch. Check out these 8 science experiments for kids to learn about sense of touch . One of my favorite is to find out my own Homunculus, the body map to show which part of my body is most and least sensitive to touch. Do you know that different parts of our body has different touch sensitivity? This is what Homunculus about. There is a simple but scientific way to find out. I am sure you and your kids would love to know about your body sensitivity or Homunculus, too. There are so many other concepts about the sense of touch and the sense of touch tells us so many attibutes of an object: shape, texture, size, weight, … Check out different science experiments testing different touch object attributes.

How to teach kids about the 5 senses? These 45 science experiments not only teach kids about senses of touch, see, smell, taste, hear, but also scientific thinking and methodology - for kids from preschool, kindergarten, to high school. Fun STEM activities for classroom, homeschool, or after school supplements. Many are also great science fair project ideas.

Through out my search and research, I have found some wonderful children’s books about senses . They are great to read with kids while you are exploring the 5 senses: My 5 Senses (age 4 to 8) The 5 Senses (age 4 and up) The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses (age 4 to 8) The 5 Senses (age 6 to 12) You Can’t Taste a Pickle with Your Ears (age 4 to 6) Smelling (age 4 to 6) I Smell Christmas (age 3 to 6) The Nose Book (age 2 to 10) The Listening Walk (age 4 to 8) All about Light (age 5 and up) Seeing (age 4 to 6) The Very Lonely Firfly (age 2 to 3) Tasting (age 4 to 6) Touching (age 4 to 6)

STEM activities for preschoolers and toddlers

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These are some really interesting ideas for making learning fun for kids. I am sure kids would love them too, thanks for sharing!

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An Experiment With the Five Senses for Kids

Kids use their five senses each day, but they may not stop to think about how their senses help them learn about the world around them. Experiments dealing with sight, hearing, taste, feeling and smell teach kids to hone in on one specific sense. The science activities develop an understanding of how the senses work together and independently in everyday situations.

What's That Sound?

Kids rely heavily on sight to identify what's happening around them. A blindfold to block out the sense of sight forces them to rely more on hearing. Make a series of sounds while the kids have their eyes closed or wear a blindfold. The kids guess the object or action based on what they hear. Another way to test the sense of hearing is with a sound walk. Move through different areas of the neighborhood or school to identify specific sounds they might not otherwise notice. Stand outside the school cafeteria while the cooks prepare lunch to identify the various cooking sounds, for example.

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Kindergarten science experiments with solids & liquids, recommended whole group time for a preschool classroom, diffusion experiments with eggs, activities on sorting plants & animals for preschool, games for listening skills, feeling it out.

A box is a simple tool that aids in experimenting with the sense of touch. Cut a hole just large enough for a child's hand to fit through in the top of the box. Place an object inside the box. The kids take turns reaching inside, feeling the object and guessing what it is. Choose objects with different textures, such as a smooth tile, rough sandpaper, a squishy sponge, mushy cooked noodles and cold ice. A variation on the touch experiment is to have the kids put a glove on one hand. Have each child touch the object with both hands -- one wearing a glove and one without. Ask the kids to describe the difference in how the object feels when the glove creates a barrier. For example, the ice won't feel as cold on the gloved hand.

Taste Testers

A blind taste test challenges the kids' sense of taste in this easy experiment. Use a blindfold or ask the kids to keep their eyes closed during the experiment. The kids taste several foods and guess what they taste. Choose foods with strong flavors from different categories. For example, include a sour lemon, sweet marshmallow and bitter piece of unsweetened chocolate. If you don't want to mess with blindfolds, have the kids taste each food item knowing what it is ahead of time. Have them record data about each food, including how it tastes and how intense the flavor. Have the kids hold their noses at first to see if the sense of smell affects the flavor of the food.

Super Sniffers

Mystery smells put kids' noses to the test. For a simple experiment, put several items with strong scents into small, opaque containers, such as black film canisters. Examples include spices, coffee, onion, mint and vinegar. To prevent spills, soak a cotton ball with any liquid items, such as vinegar or perfume, so the liquids don't leak from the container. Punch a small hole in the top so the smell wafts out without revealing the item inside. The kids guess the item inside based only on the smell.

Perfect Peepers

Experiments that take away the sense of sight show kids how hard their eyes work, but another way to experiment with sight is to test depth perception. By closing one eye, kids learn how the eyes work together. Have the kids perform a task, such as throwing a ball to a partner or tossing a ball into a container, with both eyes. Cover one eye with an eye patch and have the kids try the task again. They should find the task more challenging with the use of only one eye.

Kids Health: Experiments to Try
Education World: Ten Activities for Teaching About the Five Senses

Based in the Midwest, Shelley Frost has been writing parenting and education articles since 2007. Her experience comes from teaching, tutoring and managing educational after school programs. Frost worked in insurance and software testing before becoming a writer. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in elementary education with a reading endorsement.

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20 Engaging 5 Senses Activities

Introduce the 5 senses to preschoolers with these hands-on and printable 5 senses activities. Great for adding to your preschool unit on exploring the body’s senses! What are the 5 senses? They are sight, taste, touch, sound, and smell! Learn about the world around you with activities that use all 5 senses, or focus on one at a time. An easy way to make preschool science activities playful, fun, and engaging! Discover the world together!

What are the 5 Senses?

If you are going to explore the 5 senses, you need to know what they are first! The 5 senses include touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell. These concepts are super easy to explore with junior scientists because we use our 5 senses every day in many ways.

The senses are how we explore and learn about the world around us. Textures and colors ignite our senses of touch and sight.

New foods and tasty goodies explore our sense of taste, even if they aren’t so tasty. Smells like peppermint or cinnamon bring back memories or make us feel more in tune with the season or holiday.

The wind rustling the leaves, the waves breaking on the shore, our footsteps walking along a wooded path, or the call of a bird overhead are fantastic opportunities for listening to our senses!

Take a look at our sensory science list to read more about combining science and sensory play as well engaging the 5 senses.

Why is Learning About the 5 Senses Important?

Learning about the five senses is important for preschoolers because it lays the foundation for their understanding of the world around them. The five senses — sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell — provide essential information that helps kids make sense of their environment, interact with others, and develop various cognitive, social, and emotional skills.

Here’s why learning about the five senses is important for preschoolers:

Understanding The World

The five senses allow preschoolers to explore and understand the world around them. They learn to differentiate between objects, people, and experiences based on how they look, sound, feel, taste, and smell.

Creativity and Imagination: Learning about the five senses sparks creativity and imagination. Children can use their sensory experiences to invent stories, create art, and engage in imaginative play.

Development

Language Development: Learning about the five senses introduces children to new vocabulary and helps them express themselves more effectively. Describing sensory experiences enhances their language skills and enables them to communicate their thoughts and feelings.

Cognitive Development: Engaging with the five senses helps develop cognitive skills like observation, comparison, and categorization. Children learn to recognize patterns, similarities, and differences, which are essential cognitive processes.

Social and Emotional Development: The five senses play a role in social interactions. Children learn to read others’ emotions and intentions through facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. They also develop empathy and consideration for others’ sensory preferences and sensitivities.

Fine and Gross Motor Skills: Engaging with their senses enhances both fine and gross motor skills. Activities like painting, drawing, building with blocks, and playing with different textures promote the development of hand-eye coordination and muscle control.

Introduces Science

Scientific Inquiry: Learning about the five senses provides a basic introduction to scientific inquiry. Preschoolers begin to ask questions about how things work, why they feel or taste a certain way, and how their senses help them understand the world.

Critical Thinking: Exploring their senses encourages preschoolers to think critically and make connections between their sensory experiences and the concepts they learn. They start to develop reasoning skills by asking questions like “Why does this smell different from that?” or “How come this tastes sour?”

Everyday Applications

Safety Awareness: Understanding their senses helps preschoolers stay safe. They learn to identify potential dangers based on sensory cues, such as recognizing the smell of something burning or the sound of an approaching vehicle.

Healthy Habits: Developing an awareness of their senses can encourage healthy habits. Preschoolers can learn to make healthy food choices based on taste and smell, and they can develop good hygiene practices that involve touch and smell.

Observation and the 5 Senses

Observation in science begins with using our senses to gather information about the world around us. It involves using science process skills, paying close attention to details, making careful notes or drawings, and using tools to help us make better observations.

Making observations is an essential skill in science because it leads to collecting data and gathering evidence to support or refute hypotheses down the track. Learn more about using the scientific method with kids.

Observing is also a good way for us to explore and learn about the natural world. Young children learn when they make observations in new situations, especially with science sensory experiences.

Let’s take a closer look at how kids can practice making observations using their 5 senses:

Observing through sight involves looking closely at objects and noting their color, shape, size, and patterns. For example; start a seed jar or grow crystals!

Observing through hearing involves listening to sounds around them and identifying their source. Kids can listen to bird songs, the rustling of leaves, or the sound of raindrops. For example; try a water xylophone !

Observe through touch to explore the texture, temperature, and hardness of objects. Kids can touch different types of materials such as sand, water, feathers, or bark. Try making oobleck or slime .

Observing through taste involves exploring the flavors of different foods or substances. They can describe the tastes as sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. Try fizzy lemonade or a Candy Taste Test !

Observing through smell involves detecting and describe odors. Kids can explore different scents in their environment, such as flowers, fruits, or spices. For example; paint with spice paint !

List of 5 Senses Books

Read a book together and talk about the 5 senses. F irst, t alk about what you can and can not touch. Next, talk about how you can see something and not hear it. Then, think of times you use more than one sense.

Here are some books about the 5 senses for you to enjoy. ( I am an Amazon Affiliate )

You can find even more 5 Senses book suggestions in our printable 5 Senses preschool pack at the end!

Y ou Can’t Taste a Pickle with Your Ear by Harriet Ziefert : Seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, tasting is there a child who doesn’t wonder how the five senses work?

This Beach is Loud! by Samantha Cotterill: But it can also be busy. And loud. Sand can feel hot or itchy or sticky… and it gets everywhere! In This Beach Is Loud!, a sensitive boy gets overwhelmed by all the sights, sounds, and sensations at the beach.

The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses by Joanna Cole: On a most sense-sational trip that takes them through an eye, an ear, a tongue, and even a dog’s nose, Ms. Frizzle’s class learns about the senses.

Look, Listen, Taste, Touch, and Smell: Learning About Your Five Senses (The Amazing Body) by Pamela Hill Nettleton : Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching ― our bodies do all kinds of amazing things! It’s a colorful introduction to the five senses ― sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch ― and the organs that perform these functions. A must for any emerging science fan.

My 5 Senses (Let’s Read and Find Out) by Aliki: Sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch—our five senses teach us about our world. Beloved author-illustrator Aliki’s simple, engaging text and colorful artwork show young readers how they use their senses to smell a rose or play with a puppy.

Get Your Free Printable 5 Senses Worksheets!

5 Senses Activities For Kids

Color mixing fun.

What happens when you mix primary colors together? Set up three bowls of colored water – one with red, one with blue, and one with yellow. Provide small plastic droppers and white coffee filters. Get kids to mix different colors by using the droppers to combine the colored water on the coffee filters. What colors do they make? Combine with our printable color mixing worksheet.

Nature Scavenger Hunt

Getting kids outdoors and going on a nature walk is a great way to develop observation skills and appreciation for the natural world. Give kids a list of natural objects to find (e.g. a leaf, a rock, a flower). Encourage them to spot and collect each item with their keen sense of sight.

Rainbow Hunt

Introduce the concept of colors and light refraction with a rainbow hunt. Take kids outside on a sunny day and give them small mirrors. Encourage them to hold the mirrors at different angles and observe the rainbows formed by sunlight hitting the mirror’s surface. What colors can they see? Check out more simple ways to make a rainbow.

Shadow Puppets

Provide a flashlight and some small toys or cutouts. Have the children hold the toys in front of the flashlight to see the shadows they create. Experiment with moving the shadow puppets closer and farther away from the light to observe changes in the shadow’s size and shape. Grab our free printable to make your own shadow puppets.

Learn about sound vibrations with your own homemade kazoos. Get kids to create their own kazoos using empty toilet paper rolls and wax paper. Show them how to cover one end of the roll with the wax paper and secure it with a rubber band. Then, have them hum into the open end to produce sound. Discuss how the vibrations of their humming create sound through the kazoo.

Musical Water Glasses

Explore the sense of sound with an easy to make water xylophone. Set up a few glasses with varying levels of water. Provide the children with plastic spoons and encourage them to tap the glasses gently. Let them observe and listen to the different pitches produced by each glass. Experiment with adding or removing water to see how it affects the pitch.

Nature’s Orchestra

What about listening for the sounds you can hear in nature? Go on another nature walk, but this time, focus on listening to the sounds around them with their eyes closed. Afterward, discuss what they heard and what is the sources of each sound, such as birds chirping or leaves rustling.

Sound Guessing Game

Explore the sense of sound with a fun sound guessing game. Gather various sound-producing objects, such as bells, shakers, and whistles, in a box. Blindfold one child at a time and have them pick an object from the box. They should make the sound without revealing the object’s identity. The rest of the children try to guess which object it is based on the sound it makes.

Sweet or Sour Taste Test

Prepare small cups with different liquids, some sweet (e.g., fruit juice) and others sour (e.g., lemon juice). Blindfold kids and have them taste each liquid. After tasting, ask them to identify if it was sweet or sour and discuss their findings as a group.

Exploring Taste Buds

This time explore the sense of taste with a wide variety of foods, and come up with different words to describe those flavors. Provide kids with various foods, such as salty crackers, sweet fruits, sour candies, and bitter vegetables. Ask them to categorize each food based on its taste. Then, have a discussion about taste buds and how they help us experience different flavors.

LOOK: Apple Taste Test and Candy Taste Test

Edible Soil Layers

Use the sense of taste to understand soil layers and what they are made of. Create edible “soil” cups by layering ingredients like crushed cookies (for rocks), chocolate pudding (for soil), and gummy worms (for worms). Let the children assemble their own cups, and as they eat, talk what each food represents and why it is important to the soil.

Mystery Tasting

Blindfold the children and offer them various small food items with distinct tastes (e.g., grapes, cheese, popcorn, raisins). Ask them to identify each food solely based on taste. Afterward, reveal the items and discuss how taste helps us distinguish different foods.

Sensory Textures

Put together a sensory table with various textures, such as sandpaper, fabric, sponges, and pebbles. Let the children touch and feel each item. Encourage them to describe the textures using rough, smooth, soft, and hard words.

Mystery Touch Bag

Place various objects with different textures (e.g., a soft plush toy, a rough rock, a squishy ball) in a bag. Have each child reach into the bag one by one to feel the mystery items without looking. Have them guess what they felt and discuss their experiences. See our Guess the Object game.

Sensory Nature Prints

During a nature walk, gather leaves, flowers, and other natural materials with interesting textures. Provide kids with playdough or clay and have them press the natural items into the material to create imprints. Discuss the textures they observe and how they differ from one another.

Hot or Cold

Set up containers with warm water and cold water. Provide spoons and cups, and let kids dip their hands into each container to feel the temperature differences. Discuss their observations and talk about the basic concepts of hot and cold.

Mystery Scents

Gather various items with distinct scents, such as coffee beans, citrus peels, and flowers. Place each item in separate, airtight jars. Let the children smell each jar without seeing the contents and try to guess what’s inside based on the scent.

Engage the sense of smell while exploring creativity. Prepare a few containers with different scented paints or scented markers. Provide plain white paper and let the children create artwork using the scented materials. As they work, discuss the various scents and ask them to describe how each scent makes them feel. See how to make scented paint.

Scented Playdough

Make scented playdough using essential oils or natural scents (e.g., lavender, lemon, peppermint). Encourage kids to knead and play with the playdough, exploring the scents as they create different shapes and objects. See how to make apple scented playdough.

Fruity Smell Investigation

Use the sense of smell to explore how fruit decompose over time. Provide a variety of fruits with strong scents, such as bananas, oranges, and lemons. Have the children observe and smell each fruit. Over the course of a few days, revisit the fruits to observe how their scents change as they ripen or decompose, and talk about why that is.

Printable Preschool 5 Senses Pack

Get ready to explore this year with our growing Preschool STEM Bundle !

What’s Included:

There are 4 fun preschool themes to get you started. This is an ” I can explore” series!

My 5 Senses
All About Me
Science and Scientist

Each unit contains approximately 15 activities, with instructions and templates as needed. Hands-on activities are provided to keep it fun and exciting. This includes sensory bins, experiments, games, and more! Easy supplies keep it low cost and book suggestions add the learning time.

Subscribe to receive a free 5-Day STEM Challenge Guide

~ projects to try now ~.

25 Sensory Science Activities Exploring the Five Senses

The first theme for this year’s Storybook Science series was sensory science. We shared activities that explored the five senses perfect for preschoolers and older. Check out the collection of activities that include making observations with sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. Each of the sensory science activities was inspired by a book. Reading the books will help reinforce learning about the five senses. I get commissions for purchases made through the affiliate links in this post.

Sensory Science Activities Exploring the Five Senses

When we do science, we make observations using one or more of our five senses. Even the youngest scientists can use their senses to learn about the world around them.

Activities that Explore the Sense of Touch

These sense of touch activities focus on the sense of sight. This is a great example of how our senses work together. Often what we see helps us form opinions about what our other senses should experience.

Rainbow Texture Explorations for Toddlers inspired by a Rainbow of My Own from Inspiration Laboratories – Explore colors and textures with this activity perfect for toddlers and preschoolers.

Rainbow Sensory Ice Excavation Activity inspired by What Makes a Rainbow? from To Be A Kid Again – How can you get the ribbons out of the ice? This activity pairs wonderfully with the book recommendation as both have colorful ribbons.

Rainbow Sensory Bag for Toddlers inspired by A Rainbow of My Own from Rainy Day Mum – Explore color mixing in this mess free painting activity for toddlers.

The Lorax Sensory Tray from Science Sparks – Recreate the story of The Lorax in a sensory rice tray. The change in colors matches the changes in the story.

Cat in the Hat Sensory Tray from Science Sparks – Explore magnets and numbers with this sensory rice tray colored to mimic the Cat’s hat.

Activities that Explore the Sense of Hearing

Backyard Sound Observations inspired by Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? from Read Science – What sounds can you hear in your backyard?

What Makes a Musical Note Higher or Lower? inspired by The Way Things Work Now from Mama Smiles – Learn about the physics of sound with these video demos you can try at home.

Listening Games with Elephant and Piggie inspired by Should I Share My Ice Cream? – Work on listening skills with these fun games.

Activities that Explore Taste and Smell

Cooking and baking with kids is an excellent way to explore the senses of taste and smell. Cooking and baking are also perfect for working on science and math skills like measuring and following directions.

Chocolate Covered Peanut Butter Swirl Brownies inspired Piggy Let’s Be Friends – Brownies are a super easy way to get kids baking in the kitchen. Having a tea party to extend the sensory experience.

Visual Recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies inspired by If You Give a Mouse a Cookie – This recipe uses pictures instead of words for the ingredient list and directions.

Food Science Experiment inspired by Zoey and Sassafras: Dragons and Marshmallows – Let your children design a food science experiment to find out what foods they like to eat. It’s a fun way to try new foods and learn about conducting a science experiment.

Kitchen Chemistry Experiment: Make a Cup Cake in the Microwave inspired by Whopper Cake – Experiment with ingredients to make a cake in the microwave. This posts has sample recipes and suggestions for experimenting.

Activities that Explore the Sense of Sight

Sensory Bottles Used to Explore Shapes inspired by Mouse Shapes from JDaniel4’s Mom – Graph the different shapes you find in the sensory bottle.

Solar System Sensory Bottle inspired by How to Catch a Star – Learn about the planets in our solar system with this simple sensory bottle.

Fizzing Pinkalicious Cupcake Experiment inspired by Pinkalicious – Try this sensory science investigation to discover which combination of ingredients will make the best fizz.

Explore Shiny and Dull with Painted Foil Hearts inspired by Ollie’s Valentine from Read Science

Activities that Explore all Five Senses

Nature Scavenger Hunt inspired by The Adventures of Little Nutbrown Hare from Nature with Kids – Head out into the forest and see what you can find. Use all five senses to explore the outdoors. (Can you smell and taste the air?)

Exploring the Five Senses with Books inspired by What a Wonderful World from Great Family Reads – Go for a walk and see what observations you can make with your senses. Grab the free printable and record what you find.

Exploring the Five Senses: A Science Experiment for Kids inspired by from Edventures with Kids – get kids into the kitchen and use your senses to explore different ingredients

Roasting Pumpkin Seeds with Kids: A Five Senses Experience inspired by Pete the Cat: Five Little Pumpkins from To Be A Kid Again

Fizzy Coconut Lime Play Dough inspired by My Five Senses – This super soft cornstarch play dough is a wonderful tactile experience. For extra sensory fun it has the smell of limes and coconut plus it fizzes! This activities doesn’t explore the sense of taste. (The play dough is not edible.)

Holiday Themed Activities that Explore the Five Senses

Five senses preschool christmas and winter activities.

Jolly Christmas Postman Sensory Bin from Rainy Day Mum – Retell the story using this sensory bin with fake snow, figures, and postcards.

The Amazing Scents of Christmas inspired by The Sweet Smell of Christmas (a scratch and sniff book) from Edventures with Kids – Explore the science of smell with this hands-on activity for kids.

Melted Snowman Sensory Bag inspired by The Snowman from Rainy Day Mum – Build a snowman in this no mess sensory bag.

Snow Dough inspired by The Snowy Day from To Be A Kid Again – Try this tactile sensory experience that mimics snow.

What are your favorite sensory science activities? Do you have book recommendations to go along with them?

More Science Collections You’ll Love

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Oobleck Recipes - 25 awesome ways to explore cornstarch and water

22 Outdoor Science Experiments and Activities

Subscribe to the Inspiration Laboratories newsletter. Each issue has exclusive hands-on science explorations for children, a recap of our latest activities, and special resources selected just for you!

28 Hands-On 5 Senses Activities for Preschool, Pre-k, and Kindergarten

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Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Explore these 5 senses activities to help students understand their body and learn about these important features. My little learners love learning about their senses, and these activities are designed to be hands-on, captivating, and educational for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students. Plus, I have a 5 senses activities FREEBIE just for you!

Grab the 5 senses activities printables to get you started! Little Learners 5 Senses Science unit & Gingerbread 5 Senses Science unit for a fun holiday twist!

Grab the FREE 5 senses printable at the bottom of the post to kickstart your 5 senses activities!

This post contains affiliate links, which means I earn a tiny commission when you use my links at no cost to you.

5 Senses Activities Freebie

Popcorn experiment FREEBIE! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Popcorn Experiment! Introduce your 5 senses unit with a popcorn experiment! Kids love popcorn, and it hits all the senses in this fun, interactive experiment. Students taste, touch, smell, see, and hear the popcorn while learning about their 5 senses. This could also be a great way to end your 5 senses unit for a hands-on recap.

>>Grab the 5 senses FREEBIE by filling in your email in the box at the bottom of this post, and it will be sent to you!<<

5 Senses Activities for Touch

Touch science table! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Touch Science Table ! Set up a touch science table to allow your young children to explore their sense of feeling or touch. I have books, journal papers, and a few hands-on sorting games they can play.

I hide things in black socks so they can’t see it. Then, they stick their hands in and try to guess what is inside without looking. My students love these touch games! Plus, they are developing fine motor skills while learning about the sense of touch.

Touch book basket! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Touch Book Basket! Also, on my touch science table is a basket of books perfect for touching! These titles feature areas to touch and feel with tons of different textures and materials. The Never Touch a … titles are a great addition to a senses book basket.

DIY sensory walk! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

DIY Sensory Walk! Create your own sensory walk for science time or use it during indoor recess or gross motor time. I glued different textures and materials to pieces of cardstock. Students took their shoes and socks off and walked across the pages. They were able to feel all the different textures with their feet.

Sensory bag writing! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Sensory Bag Writing! To give students another touch opportunity, we practice writing on a sensory bag. This is a hair gel bag with glitter and a little bit of liquid watercolor mixed inside. Students can use their fingers or a pom pom to write letters, numbers, words, etc. Click here to get step-by-step directions for making a sensory bag.

Sandpaper and cinnamon writing! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Sandpaper and Cinnamon Writing! I love these 5 senses activities for writing! Grab some sandpaper and cinnamon sticks to make your own letter sheets. Write the letters or numbers on the sandpaper. Then, students can use their fingers to trace the letters. For even more sensory, give them a cinnamon stick to trace the letter with. This not only gives them a chance to learn about touch but also smell! Plus, your room will smell amazing when they are done!

5 Senses Activities for Smell

Smell science table! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Smell Science Table ! Check out my science table all about the sense of smell. There are books, journal pages, smell sorts, and a smelling exploration. Your young children will love the matching smell game. The science table is a great place to give students more opportunities for social interaction, sensory activities, and help develop problem-solving skills.

I place smelly items in the salt and pepper shakers from the dollar store. I put tape around them so students can see inside as easily. This is the best way I have found to kind of hide the materials inside. Then, students smell the shakers and guess what is inside by placing a small picture on the velcro. You can also place cotton balls with different scents of essential oils on them inside the shakers.

Smelly writing! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Smelly Writing! For an easy smell center for 5 senses activities, grab some smelly markers and paper. Students can explore the scents while writing and drawing in the classroom.

Smelly painting! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Smelly Painting! Create a smelly painting by mixing your paint with liquid extracts from the cooking aisle. I made maple, banana, and orange paints so that they were scents that my students would recognize.

Smelly play dough! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Smelly Play Dough! Add Kool-Aid powder to your homemade play dough to make it smelly! I also added liquid watercolor to make the colors more vibrant! If you are learning about the 5 senses during the holidays, I like to add cinnamon to my homemade play dough. My students love the different smells, and this makes great multi sensory experiences for your students.

5 Senses Activities for Hearing

Hearing science table! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Hearing Science Table ! Set up a science table all about the sense of hearing. I like to have books, journal papers, hearing sort, and a hearing activity.

Create a hearing exploration with some small containers filled with a variety of objects that sound differently when shaken. I put tape around the containers so students can’t see what is inside until they flip it over to check their guesses.

Hearing book basket! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Hearing Book Basket! Check out some of my favorite hearing books that I use in my preschool room. These sound books are perfect for exposing students to a variety of sounds from different environments.

Sound walk! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Sound Walk! Go on a sound walk around the school or outside. I like to read the book The Listening Walk . Then we go outside if the weather is nice or walk around the school building listening. Use the recording page to keep track of things that you hear.

Explore instruments! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Explore Instruments! One way to explore the sense of hearing is by using musical instruments in the classroom. My students love making music while learning about the sense of hearing.

Sound tempos! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Sound Tempos! Give students a chance to get out their extra energy while they explore tempos and hearing. My students are using ribbon shakers to move and dance with. They are pieces of ribbon tied to plastic bracelets. Talk about fast and slow tempos during this activity.

Sound shakers! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Sound Shakers! Use plastic eggs and fill them with different objects for different sounds. Then tape them shut. So easy but such a fun learning experience. I also use these during dance parties, indoor recess, and gross motor time. Your students will have a lot of fun shaking and moving with these simple egg shakers.

5 Senses Activities for Sight

Sight science table! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Sight Science Table! Check out my sight science table for preschool, pre-k, or kindergarten students. Lots of books, journal pages, and sight activities. My students love the I Spy bottles for a fun activity about the sense of sight.

I spy bottles! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

I Spy Bottles! Create I spy bottles for a fun and engaging sight activity. Students will look for objects in the bottles. I also have a bunch of sensory bottles for tons of themes throughout the year. You can find them here . You could also create these on a larger scale in sensory bins for students to touch and spy various items. That would be so much fun for kids of all ages!

Sight book basket! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Sight Book Basket! In my book basket for sight, I love these books for preschool students. My students love I Spy books and these board ones are simple and perfect for little minds.

Literacy and math I spy bottles! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Math & Literacy I Spy Bottles! If your students love the I spy bottles like mine do, I also created math and literacy I spy bottles. I have a number, shapes, names, and letters bottle. There are also FREE worksheets that go with the bottles to guide students in what they should be looking for.

To get step-by-step directions and FREE printables for the other I spy bottles just click the words for the one you would like to make: numbers , shapes , names , and letters .

I spy classroom hunts! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

I Spy Classroom Hunts! Give your students a magnifying glass and watch them explore their environment. I like to give them a list of things to find around the room, but you could also just let them freely explore their area. If the weather is nice, go on a nature walk! Outside, you can hear various sounds, see different colors, touch various items, smell different scents, and maybe taste a thing or two.

5 Senses Activities for Taste

Taste test! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Taste Test ! Explore the sense of taste with a fun taste test in the classroom. I use pretzels, lemons, cookies, and dark chocolate for my taste test. Grab the printables for this fun exploration here . We do this as a whole class activity for students to practice making inferences, gather data, and describe results. We also talk about our taste buds.

5 senses tubs! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

5 Senses Tubs! If your classroom is small, you can make a tub for each sense to have for your students. When we talk about each one, I show them everything in the tub, and then they can get things out during center time. If there is a tub that is very popular, I will leave it out for longer than the unit until they become bored with it.

5 senses anchor chart! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

5 Senses Anchor Chart ! Create this anchor chart with your students for interactive 5 senses activities that teach. Use the anchor chart printables to get started and then help students add more ideas.

5 senses sort! Explore 28 hands-on 5 senses activities and centers for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

5 Senses Sort ! Give students these hands-on 5 senses activities with some sorting mats. Students can look at the pictures and sort them by the sense that they will use with it.

I hope you enjoyed these 5 senses activities, and I can’t wait to see what you do in your classroom! My students love a five senses unit and learn so much. You can do it at the beginning of the year with your all about me theme or during the holidays with a gingerbread twist.

Click the pictures below to grab the 5 senses printables that you need for your lesson plans!

Little Learners Science all about 5 senses, a printable science unit designed for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten students.

Want to see these 5 senses activities in action? Just click the picture below for a video!

Grab the 5 senses FREEBIE by filling in the box below!

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5 Senses for Kids Lesson with FUN Hands-on Activities

Kindergarten

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Come explore the 5 senses for kids with this fun, engaginge five senses for kids lesson plan. with us as part of our 5 senses unit. We explore some great books, videos, learned about the sense of touch for kindergarten by making and edible skin layers project , hands-on sense of sight activities , dissecting a cow eye experiment and so much more. This is a five senses for kindergarten , preschool, pre-K, first grade, 2nd grade, and 3rd graders is a great way to learn about the sense of sight, sounds, taste, touch, and smell.

5 Senses for Kids

Kids of all ages will have fun learning about the five senses for kids with this clever unit filled with lots of . There are so many 5 Senses activities to help kids understand hearing, smelling, seeing, touching, and tasting. From an edible eyes senses activity to disecting a ow eye, ear drum experiment to books and videos on how your ears work – this unit is filled with engaging ways for kids of all ages to learn about how they perceive the world around them. This are so many fun books, clever projects, edible science and more with these ideas for teaching 5 senses to preschoolers , toddlers, kindergartners, grade 1, grade 2, and grade 3 students.

Five senses Activities

Whether you are a parent, teacher, or homeschooler – you will love all these fun ideas to introduce children to their five senses. We have not only clever 5 senses activities for at home, in the classroom, or your homeschool coop – but we also have free 5 senses worksheets and 5 senses printables book to help guide young learners too.

Sense of Hearing

First we used sense of hearing activities to learn about how we hear with our ears. We used these 5 senses activities for preschoolers and elementary age students to learn more:

Hearing games

Cup & String Telephone – You’ve probably seen this done in old classic movies, but what you may not know is it actually works. Keep the string taut and you’ll be amazed to hear the sound waves travel across the string.
Otoscope – Let kids get a look at the inside of a human ear using an otoscope .
Ear Drum Activity – Kids will be amazed to see how a loud noise near the model ear will make the ear drum vibrate. (see the ear drum experiment )

Sense of sight activities

Five senses activities for first grade

Dissecting a Cow eye in homeschool science

Eye Experiments

5 senses hands on activities for kindergarten.

Edible Skin – layer of mini marshmallows, followed by red jello, and fruit roll-up with holes for pores with licorice hair sticking through the pores.
Touch Bags – We put a variety of item sin brown bags for the kids to touch and try to determine what they were: pine cones, slime, feather, sugar, etc.

Sense of touch activities for preschool

Edible skin layers project

Sense of smell activities

Sense of Taste Activities

This fun hands-on human body for kids activity is such a fun way to learn about our amazing bodies! These free printable Human Body Playdough Mats are a fun way for kids of all ages to learn about what is inside our body. Children will make a play doh human body with these playdough mats to learn about our bones, skeletal system, muscles, organs, play doh digestive system, and more! Use these playdough mats as part of a study of the human body for kids study with toddler, preschool, pre k, kindergarten, first grade, 2nd grade, and 3rd grade students. Kids will love that they can add the body parts to the free playdough mats making it a truly hands on science activity.

Human Body Activities

Grab this free printable 5 senses preschool printables to explore the senses of sight, taste, sound, smell, and touch
Human Body human body playdough mats – lots of choices to learn about various systems of the body including simple for preschoolers, skeletal system, organs, muscles, nerves, and more!
Teach kids about human cells for kids with hands on activities, free printable reader, human cell worksheet s, and more!
Human Body Printables makes a printable book that teaches students all about their heart, brain, muscles, cells, skin, bones, lungs, stomach, intestines, and bladder
4 EPIC Skeletal System Project ideas for kids – using things like pasta, life saver gummies, lego, and more you can learn about the human body in a fun memorable way

This fun, hands-on lungs for kids lesson will help you make a working lungs model for kids using a plastic bottle and balloon. This human body for kids project is great for kindergarten, first grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade, 6th garde, and 7th grade students. We will show you how to make a lung model that will help children understand how this important organ works with a human body activity for kids!

Parts of the Brain for Kids Activity with Playdough Brain Model & Free Brain Worksheets for Kids
Lungs for Kids Working Model and lesson plan
Human Heart for Kids : 2 Fun Heart Models plus Worksheets
Blood for Kids – Actiivty to learn about the Human Body
Free Skeletal System Worksheet s for Kids – everything you need to teach kids about their bodies!
Kids will love learning about the ear with this model of ear for school project
Amazing 5 Senses for kids lesson to explore with hands on activities, videos, books, and more!
Try this Jelly Bean sense of taste activities for preschool experiment.
Kids will be amazed by these eye science experiments
Huge pack of 5 Senses Worksheets to explore the senses and sneak in some math and literacy activities too
EPIC, Life-size Human Body Project
See all of our hands-on ideas to make learning about the human body for kids FUN and more creative printable science experiments for all ages

100 Amazing Food experiments for summer science with kids

Science for Kids

Looking for lots more fun, science experiments for kids? You’ve GOT to try some of these outrageously fun science experiments for kids! We have so many fun, creative and easy science experiments for elementary age children:

100 Amazing Food science experiments – arranged by type of science
Colorful Capillary action experiment (also known as walking water)
Amaze kids with these 12 Hands on battery experiment s
24 Epic Solar system science project s to try this week
Fun Water balloon experiment that explores density
Easy Candy Water Displacement Experiment
50 Fun Preschool science experiments the whole family will want to try
Easy Rubber Band Car
Paint Stick Solar System Project Ideas
Simple Bernoille Ping Pong Ball experiment
Fun-to-Make Lego Balloon Car Project
Popsicle Stick Catapult STEM Project for Kids
EPIC Exploding Snowman Science Experiment for Winter
Melting Christmas Science Experiments
Simple Galaxy science project
Easy and Fun Dancing Raisins
Learn about weather as you find how to make a weather vane
Eye opening Eye science experiments
Easy-to- make Air pressure experiments
Stunning Chromatography Flowers are so pretty you’ll forget it was as science project!
How to Make a Lava Lamp – super easy and SO cool!
30 Simple machines for kids projects you will want to try
Easy, fascinating, and colorful project answering why do leaves change color for kids

Animal Classifications for Kids Cootie Catchers

Free Printable Animal Classifications for Kids Cootie Catchers
Amazing POP rocks experiment is one of our all-time favorite science experiments we like to do during the summer are
19 Edible science experiments – which delicious project will you try first?
HUGE Free Solar System for Kindergarten (coloring pages, hands on science projects, worksheets, and more!)
Pipe Cleaner Constellation Activity (As seen on Good Housekeeping!)
Teach kids about conductivity with this fun electricity experiment projects
Amazing, Heat Sensitive, Color Changing Slime
Life Cycles for Kids (from penguin to sunflower and spider to turkey we have LOTS of life cycles to explore and learn about)
EASY, Colorful Oil and Water Experiment Worksheets
4 Fun Skeletal System Project Ideas
Kids will be amazed as you change colors of white flowers with this food coloring flower experiment worksheet
This super cool Lego Zipline is fun and simple to make
EPIC Life-size Human Body Project w/ free printables!
Check out this super cool look INSIDE a Volcano Experiment for Kids
Exploding Watermelon – science experiment that explores potential and kinetic energy with a big WOW moment!
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Find LOTS more EASY Printable Science Experiments for kids of all ages!

Beth Gorden

Beth Gorden is the creative multi-tasking creator of 123 Homeschool 4 Me. As a busy homeschooling mother of six, she strives to create hands-on learning activities and worksheets that kids will love to make learning FUN! She has created over 1 million pages of printables to help teach kids ABCs, science, English grammar, history, math, and so much more! Beth is also the creator of 2 additional sites with even more educational activities and FREE printables – www.kindergartenworksheetsandgames.com and www.preschoolplayandlearn.com. Beth studied at the University of Northwestern where she got a double major to make her effective at teaching children while making education FUN!

September 19, 2012

5 ways to explore the sense of sight, sense of sight activities for preschool and kindergarten.

2 comments:

Love your images, Allison!

I can't tell you enough how creative these activities and experiments are! Wonderful Job!!!

Thank you for visiting and taking the time to comment. I love reading your feedback. Have a blessed day!

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Young girl wearing protective eye wear looks at different colour dye in glasses

Summer holiday science: turn your home into a lab with these three easy experiments

Associate Professor in Biology, University of Limerick

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Audrey O'Grady receives funding from Science Foundation Ireland. She is affiliated with Department of Biological Sciences, University of Limerick.

University of Limerick provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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Many people think science is difficult and needs special equipment, but that’s not true.

Science can be explored at home using everyday materials. Everyone, especially children, naturally ask questions about the world around them, and science offers a structured way to find answers.

Misconceptions about the difficulty of science often stem from a lack of exposure to its fun and engaging side. Science can be as simple as observing nature, mixing ingredients or exploring the properties of objects. It’s not just for experts in white coats, but for everyone.

Don’t take my word for it. Below are three experiments that can be done at home with children who are primary school age and older.

Extract DNA from bananas

DNA is all the genetic information inside cells. Every living thing has DNA, including bananas.

Did you know you can extract DNA from banana cells?

What you need: ¼ ripe banana, Ziploc bag, salt, water, washing-up liquid, rubbing alcohol (from a pharmacy), coffee filter paper, stirrer.

What you do:

Place a pinch of salt into about 20ml of water in a cup.

Add the salty water to the Ziploc bag with a quarter of a banana and mash the banana up with the salty water inside the bag, using your hands. Mashing the banana separates out the banana cells. The salty water helps clump the DNA together.

Once the banana is mashed up well, pour the banana and salty water into a coffee filter (you can lay the filter in the cup you used to make the salty water). Filtering removes the big clumps of banana cells.

Once a few ml have filtered out, add a drop of washing-up liquid and swirl gently. Washing-up liquid breaks down the fats in the cell membranes which makes the DNA separate from the other parts of the cell.

Slowly add some rubbing alcohol (about 10ml) to the filtered solution. DNA is insoluble in alcohol, therefore the DNA will clump together away from the alcohol and float, making it easy to see.

DNA will start to precipitate out looking slightly cloudy and stringy. What you’re seeing is thousands of DNA strands – the strands are too small to be seen even with a normal microscope. Scientists use powerful equipment to see individual strands.

Learn how plants ‘drink’ water

What you need: celery stalks (with their leaves), glass or clear cup, water, food dye, camera.

Fill the glass ¾ full with water and add 10 drops of food dye.
Place a celery stalk into the glass of coloured water. Take a photograph of the celery.
For two to three days, photograph the celery at the same time every day. Make sure you take a photograph at the very start of the experiment.

What happens and why?

All plants, such as celery, have vertical tubes that act like a transport system. These narrow tubes draw up water using a phenomenon known as capillarity.

Imagine you have a thin straw and you dip it into a glass of water. Have you ever noticed how the water climbs up the straw a little bit, even though you didn’t suck on it? This is because of capillarity.

In plants, capillarity helps move water from the roots to the leaves. Plants have tiny tubes inside them, like thin straws, called capillaries. The water sticks to the sides of these tubes and climbs up. In your experiment, you will see the food dye in the water make its way to the leaves.

Build a balloon-powered racecar

What you need: tape, scissors, two skewers, cardboard, four bottle caps, one straw, one balloon.

Cut the cardboard to about 10cm long and 5cm wide. This will form the base of your car.
Make holes in the centre of four bottle caps. These are your wheels.
To make the axles insert the wooden skewers through the holes in the cap. You will need to cut the skewers to fit the width of the cardboard base, but leave room for the wheels.
Secure the wheels to the skewers with tape.
Attach the axles to the underside of the car base with tape, ensuring the wheels can spin freely.
Insert a straw into the opening of a balloon and secure it with tape, ensuring there are no air leaks.
Attach the other end of the straw to the top of the car base, positioning it so the balloon can inflate and deflate towards the back of the car. Secure the straw with tape.
Inflate the balloon through the straw, pinch the straw to hold the air, place the car on a flat surface, then release the straw.

The inflated balloon stores potential energy when blown up. When the air is released, Newton’s third law of motion kicks into gear: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

As the air rushes out of the balloon (action), it pushes the car in the opposite direction (reaction). The escaping air propels the car forward, making it move across the surface.

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How to customize (or replace) the Windows Start menu

By David Nield

Posted on Aug 16, 2024 6:02 PM EDT

6 minute read

The Start menu is usually at the heart of everything you do on Windows , giving you easy access to all of your installed applications as well as the files and folders that are on your system. You’ll likely be spending a lot of time looking at and using the Start menu, so it makes sense to get it configured the way that best suits you.

There are more ways to tweak and personalize the Windows Start menu than you might have realized, and with the help of third-party software, you can even replace it altogether (it’s a bit like reskinning Android ). We’ve covered your options below. (If you’re a macOS user, we have a similar guide for you here .)

Customizing the Windows Start menu

It’s not difficult to get started: You can right-click on any of the apps in the Start menu and choose Pin to Start , for example. This means the app shortcut will show up on the pane that first appears when you open the Start menu, so it’s a handy way of getting to your favorite programs more quickly.

Apps that have been pinned to the ‘front’ of the Start menu can be rearranged too — just drag and drop them into a new location. If this opening Start menu screen has shortcuts that you don’t need very often, right-click on them and pick Unpin from Start . The app stays on your computer, but you’ll need to dig deeper into the Start menu to find it.

You can tweak the Start menu further by launching the main Windows Settings panel, then selecting Personalization and Start . Right away you’ll see there are three layouts to pick from, each offering a different combination of pinned app shortcuts and links to recently opened files and folders.

You have Toggle switches further down that allow you to control what is and isn’t shown on the Start menu. Your options here include apps you’ve recently installed, apps you use a lot, files and folders you’ve recently opened in Windows, tips and recommendations from Microsoft, and occasional notifications. It’s up to you how cluttered or uncluttered you’d prefer your menu to be.

Select Folders and, via small icons along the bottom, choose which folders are available right from the first pane of the Start menu. Here your options include Documents , Pictures , and Videos , so you can set up quick links to the places on your system that you visit the most.

The final customization option Windows offers you isn’t in the Start menu section of Settings. Head to Personalization and then pick Taskbar , and under Taskbar behaviors and Taskbar alignment you can choose whether the Start menu button appears in the center of your taskbar or on the left ( where it traditionally has been on earlier versions of Windows).

It’s not difficult to reverse these changes either, and get the Start menu back into the center or as it looks on a fresh installation. Under Personalization and Start from Settings, for example, just click Default to go back to the default mix of pinned apps and recommended files.

Replacing the Windows Start menu

If you want to really get serious about Start menu customization, you can replace the built-in offering with something completely new. There are a few software packages around that will do this for you, and you don’t need to worry about breaking anything—you can simply uninstall the customization program to get the Start menu back to normal again.

One of the best apps in this particular business is Stardock Start11 , which lets you reconfigure the Start menu in all kinds of ways—and even return to the classic look of Windows operating systems of years gone by. The software will cost you a one-time fee of $9.99 for one computer, but you can try it for free first to see if you like it.

As well as editing the layout and shape of the Start menu, you can also adjust its color scheme and transparency, and you can apply the same sort of reskinning to the taskbar too, for a unified look. You can move around the Start menu and taskbar as well, and even have them pinned to the top of the display.

Another comprehensive Windows customization package is Rainmeter —and while it includes options for replacing and revamping the Start menu and taskbar, it also gives you options for changing the look of the entire Windows desktop. If you want pixel-by-pixel control over the look of Windows then it’s ideal, and it’s free to use too.

As it is so comprehensive and full featured, the process of getting started with Rainmeter is a little more involved, but there’s plenty in the way of help and documentation. A good way to get started is to download one of the skins created by other users (and there are a lot of them), and then tweak that, rather than starting from scratch. Building your own skin is a little bit like coding your own website, but it’s not too difficult.

Using either Start11 or Rainmeter, you can end up with a desktop operating system that doesn’t look much like the normal Windows at all—and that gives you the opportunity to get the apps, files, folders, and Windows features that you use most often in places where they’re easily accessible.

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Top Data Science Project Ideas for CSE Students

Data Science has become one of the most sought-after fields in the tech industry, offering lucrative career opportunities and the ability to work on cutting-edge technologies. For Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) students, delving into Data Science projects can provide invaluable hands-on experience and help bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application.

Whether you are a beginner looking to build foundational skills or an advanced student aiming to tackle complex challenges, this article will present a range of Data Science project ideas tailored for CSE students.

By working on these Data Science projects, CSE students can develop a deep understanding of data analysis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Additionally, these projects can serve as impressive portfolio pieces, showcasing your skills to potential employers. In this article, we will explore a variety of Data Science project ideas for CSE students, ranging from beginner to advanced levels. We will also discuss the tools and techniques you’ll need to succeed in these projects.

Why Data Science Projects Matter for CSE Students

Engaging in Data Science projects is not just about completing assignments or fulfilling academic requirements. These projects provide a platform for CSE students to explore real-world problems and apply their coding, analytical, and problem-solving skills. In today’s data-driven world, employers are looking for candidates who not only have theoretical knowledge but also practical experience in handling data, building models, and deriving insights.

Data Science Project Ideas for Beginners

If you’re new to Data Science, it’s essential to start with projects that help you grasp the basics of data manipulation, analysis, and visualization. Here are some beginner-friendly Data Science project ideas for CSE students:

1. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) on a Public Dataset

Description:

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is a crucial step in any Data Science project. It involves analyzing datasets to summarize their main characteristics, often using visual methods. For this project, you can choose a public dataset from sources like Kaggle, UCI Machine Learning Repository , or government databases. The goal is to clean the data, handle missing values, and create insightful visualizations that reveal trends and patterns.

Tools and Techniques:

You’ll need to use programming languages like Python or R and libraries such as Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, and Plotly. This project will help you build a strong foundation in data cleaning and visualization, which are essential skills in Data Science.

2. Sentiment Analysis on Social Media Posts

Sentiment analysis is a popular application of Natural Language Processing (NLP). This project involves analyzing social media posts, such as tweets or product reviews, to determine the sentiment behind the text (positive, negative, or neutral). You can use Twitter API to collect data or choose a pre-existing dataset.

Python, Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), TextBlob, and Scikit-learn are commonly used for sentiment analysis. This project will introduce you to text processing, feature extraction, and machine learning classification techniques.

3. Predicting House Prices

House price prediction is a classic Data Science project that involves building a regression model to predict the price of a house based on various features such as location, size, number of bedrooms, etc. This project is an excellent way to learn about regression algorithms and model evaluation.

You’ll use Python, Pandas, Scikit-learn, and Matplotlib to clean the data, build the model, and evaluate its performance. Understanding regression and model tuning will be key outcomes of this project.

Intermediate Data Science Project Ideas

Once you have mastered various simple projects and you feel confident, it is time for you to proceed to more advanced Data Science project ideas, like those that require a deeper knowledge of algorithms and data processing techniques.

4. Building a Recommendation System

Recommendation systems, utilized mostly for instance in Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify, are out to provide suggestions relating the products or content that the users might need. You will be creating a recommendation system with collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, or a hybrid approach in this project.

Python, Pandas, Scikit-learn, and libraries like Surprise or LightFM are commonly used in recommendation systems. This project will help you understand user-item interactions, matrix factorization, and evaluation metrics such as RMSE or MAE.

5. Customer Segmentation Using Clustering

Customer segmentation is a method wrought by enterprises to subdivide their customer base into disparate factions depending on their actions, favorites, or demographics. You would employ algorithms like clustering such as K-Means or DBSCAN to group customers by their purchasing history or any similar features they have in this project.

The tools that will be most useful for this project are Python, Pandas, Scikit-learn , and the visualization libraries. One of the topics you will cover is grouping. feature scaling, and also the ability to understand and use the visualizations of the findings in your segments will be the major areas that will be covered in these lessons.

6. Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting involves predicting future values based on previously observed values. This project can be applied to various domains, such as stock price prediction, weather forecasting, or demand forecasting. You’ll work with time series data and apply models like ARIMA, SARIMA, or Prophet.

Python, Pandas, Statsmodels, and Facebook Prophet are popular tools for time series forecasting. You’ll gain insights into time series decomposition, stationarity, and model evaluation using metrics like MAE or MAPE.

Advanced Data Science Project Ideas

The following Data Science project ideas are suitable for learners who have already grasped the fundamentals of Data Science and are aspiring for higher levels of challenge.

7. Image Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)

Image classification is one of the basic problems of image understanding, where the input is assigned to one of the given classes. In this project, you will be developing a CNN model to classify images from a dataset such as CIFAR-10 or the MNIST. In this project, you will learn what it means to do deep learning and understand neural networks.

Python, TensorFlow or PyTorch and Keras are very important when it comes to constructing CNNs. Expect to understand convolutional layers, pooling layers, and how to transfer learn a convolutional neural network for tasks of image classification.

8. Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Transformers

Word vectors have been transformative in NLP and they are the key behind the current state of the art models such as BERT, GPT and T5. Here in this project, you will be working with transformers to identify how you can apply them in Natural Language Processing , and this will include, for instance, text classification, named-entity recognition, or even machine translation.

Thus, the scripts of this project should be written in Python, using Hugging Face Transformers library and developed with TensorFlow or PyTorch. You will also get acquainted with pre-trained models, fine-tuning as well as the transfer learning in NLP.

9. Building a Predictive Maintenance System

Maintenance based on the outcome involves the application of analytic components to foresee when a piece of equipment is most likely to stop working, then carry out maintenance. This project is especially useful in some business sectors such as manufacturing and energy industries.

Python, Pandas, scikit-learn, possibly IoT data feeds are utilized in use cases of predictive maintenance. Using sensor data, time series analysis as well as classification techniques you will develop your predictive model.

10. Anomaly Detection in Network Traffic

Anomaly is an important way of detecting what different from the usual processes that can be due to either security threats or system failures. In this project, you will have to work with the data from network traffic and with the help of machine learning, find out about anomalies in it.

Python, Scikit-learn as part of Python libraries for data science, PyOD as Python Outlier Detection and quite possibly tools for handling network data such as Wireshark. By engaging in this project, you will learn more about unsupervised learning, feature engineering and anomaly detection algorithms.

Embarking on Data Science projects is an excellent way for CSE students to gain practical experience and prepare for a career in this exciting field. Whether you are a beginner, intermediate, or advanced student, there are Data Science project ideas that will challenge you and help you develop critical skills. From Exploratory Data Analysis to building sophisticated machine learning models, these projects provide a valuable opportunity to apply your knowledge and create impactful solutions.

As you work on these Data Science projects, remember to document your process, share your work on platforms like GitHub, and continuously seek feedback from peers and mentors. These efforts will not only enhance your learning but also showcase your abilities to potential employers. By tackling these Data Science project ideas for CSE students, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a proficient Data Scientist with a portfolio that stands out in the competitive job market.

1. What are some good beginners Data Science project ideas for CSE students?

Beginner-friendly Data Science project ideas include Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) on public datasets, sentiment analysis on social media posts, and predicting house prices using regression models.

2. How can I choose the right Data Science project for my skill level?

Assess your current knowledge and comfort level with data analysis and machine learning tools. Start with simpler projects to build your confidence and gradually move on to more complex tasks as you gain experience.

3. What tools are essential for Data Science projects?

Python is the most widely used programming language in Data Science, along with libraries like Pandas, Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, and Matplotlib. Other tools include R, SQL, and data visualization libraries.

4. How can I showcase my Data Science projects to potential employers?

Document your projects thoroughly, share them on platforms like GitHub, and consider writing blog posts or creating a portfolio website. Networking and participating in hackathons or competitions can also help you get noticed.

5. What is the importance of Data Science projects for CSE students?

Data Science projects allow CSE students to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world problems, build practical skills, and create a portfolio that demonstrates their capabilities to employers.

Brain wiring is guided by activity even in very early development

In humans, the process of learning is driven by different groups of cells in the brain firing together. For instance, when the neurons associated with the process of recognizing a dog begin to fire in a coordinated manner in response to the cells that encode the features of a dog -- four legs, fur, a tail, etc. -- a young child will eventually be able to identify dogs going forward. But brain wiring begins before humans are born, before they have experiences or senses like sight to guide this cellular circuitry. How does that happen?

In a new study published Aug. 15 in Science , Yale researchers identified how brain cells begin to coalesce into this wired network in early development before experience has a chance to shape the brain. It turns out that very early development follows the same rules as later development -- cells that fire together wire together. But rather than experience being the driving force, it's spontaneous cellular activity.

"One of the fundamental questions we are pursuing is how the brain gets wired during development," said Michael Crair, co-senior author of the study and the William Ziegler III Professor of Neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine. "What are the rules and mechanisms that govern brain wiring? These findings help answer that question."

For the study, researchers focused on mouse retinal ganglion cells, which project from the retina to a region of the brain called the superior colliculus where they connect to downstream target neurons. The researchers simultaneously measured the activity of a single retinal ganglion cell, the anatomical changes that occurred in that cell during development, and the activity of surrounding cells in awake neonatal mice whose eyes had not yet opened. This technically complex experiment was made possible by advanced microscopy techniques and fluorescent proteins that indicate cell activity and anatomical changes.

Previous research has shown that before sensory experience can take place -- for instance, when humans are in the womb or, in the days before young mice open their eyes -- spontaneously generated neuronal activity correlates and forms waves. In the new study, researchers found that when the activity of a single retinal ganglion cell was highly synchronized with waves of spontaneous activity in surrounding cells, the single cell's axon -- the part of the cell that connects to other cells -- grew new branches. When the activity was poorly synchronized, axon branches were instead eliminated.

"That tells us that when these cells fire together, associations are strengthened," said Liang Liang, co-senior author of the study and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine. "The branching of axons allows more connections to be made between the retinal ganglion cell and the neurons sharing the synchronized activity in the superior colliculus circuit."

This finding follows what's known as "Hebb's rule," an idea put forward by psychologist Donald Hebb in 1949; at that time Hebb proposed that when one cell repeatedly causes another cell to fire, the connections between the two are strengthened.

"Hebb's rule is applied quite a lot in psychology to explain the brain basis of learning," said Crair, who is also the vice provost for research and a professor of ophthalmology and visual science. "Here we show that it also applies during early brain development with subcellular precision."

In the new study, the researchers were also able to determine where on the cell branch formation was most likely to occur, a pattern that was disrupted when the researchers disturbed synchronization between the cell and the spontaneous waves.

Spontaneous activity occurs during development in several other neural circuits, including in the spinal cord, hippocampus, and cochlea. While the specific pattern of cellular activity would be different in each of those areas, similar rules may govern how cellular wiring takes place in those circuits, said Crair.

Going forward, the researchers will explore whether these patterns of axon branching persist after a mouse's eyes open and what happens to the downstream connected neuron when a new axon branch forms.

"The Crair and Liang labs will continue to combine our expertise in brain development and single-cell imaging to examine how the assembly and refinement of brain circuits is guided by precise patterns of neural activity at different developmental stages," said Liang.

The research was supported in part by the Kavli Institute of Neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by Yale University . Original written by Mallory Locklear. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

Naoyuki Matsumoto, Daniel Barson, Liang Liang, Michael C. Crair. Hebbian instruction of axonal connectivity by endogenous correlated spontaneous activity . Science , 2024; 385 (6710) DOI: 10.1126/science.adh7814

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Science How to take a stunning photo of the Milky Way with your smartphone: a beginner's guide

The Milky Way galaxy in the night sky above a lit-up rock.

In just 30 seconds I captured the core of our galaxy, the Milky Way, glowing brightly behind a dark wispy haze of cosmic dust.

Deep inside that glow lies a supermassive black hole 4 million times the mass of our Sun.

And stretching out on either side is a smattering of stars: pinpricks of photons that may have travelled millennia before reaching Earth.

It's a stunning shot, but it wasn't taken with a telescope or fancy camera.

I used my smartphone. And it's not even a top-of-the-line one.

It was a chilly winter evening outside Cohuna, Victoria, on Barapa Barapa country, where astrophotographer Shayne Mostyn showed me the ropes.

He has taken many first-timers like me out for smartphone astrophotography workshops, and says everyone reacts in wonder when they snap their first photo of the Milky Way.

"It would be pitch black and then all their faces would start lighting up … and you could hear the whole group go 'wow!'"

Winter in Australia is the best time to take wow-worthy photos of the Milky Way. The cold, crisp night air holds less water vapour than it does during the warmer, more humid summer, so skies at the moment look particularly clear.

And Earth's current position on its orbit around the Sun means we can now look into the heart of our galaxy at night.

Smartphones, with their wide field of view, are ideal for taking photos of big celestial objects such as the Milky Way.

This is how a beginner like me took these photos.

Smartphone astrophotography basics

First up, the obvious: you need a smartphone .

I won't go into step-by-step set-up details for each make and model — you can look that up online — but you might be surprised at what your phone can do.

And there are a few things to keep in mind, regardless of the phone you use.

For most, Shane says, the camera app that comes with the phone is fine. They usually come with a night mode, which lets you shoot a longer exposure time than a daytime snap, and lets you capture all those tiny dots of starlight.

Some models have special astrophotography settings that let you increase exposure time. Others automatically realign the stars so you don't end up with star trails, where the stars look like streaks in the sky.

But even if you don't have these options, you can still snap fab photos.

I used an iPhone 14 and its default camera app.

The other piece of must-have equipment is a tripod . This is not negotiable, and is necessary regardless of the phone you use.

For some phones, the long-exposure option only becomes available when your phone is held completely still in a tripod.

It doesn't have to be expensive either. Just needs to be able to point the phone in a bunch of different directions and hold it still.

Third: you need a dark, clear sky . This means as little light pollution as possible, so get away from towns which might light up the horizon.

Online light pollution maps can help you find suitably dark skies.

Also choose a night when the Moon is either absent or a tiny crescent, otherwise it's like a giant spotlight that washes out the stars.

And … that's it. Put your phone on the tripod, open the camera app, point it towards the most star-packed part of the sky, and hit the shutter button.

"That's how good the tech is in these things — you set it up under a dark sky, hit the shutter, then wait," Shayne says.

"It's not rocket science."

#ABCmyphoto does the night sky Are you a keen to give this a go? Show us your best shots and you could be featured in a special Science Week Picture of the Week gallery. Use #ABCmyphoto on Instagram or tag @abcaustralia , or upload your photos here and show us what the night sky looks like in your part of the world!

Time to experiment

Once you have the basics down pat, start experimenting with what's around you.

The best astrophotos usually feature the landscape in the image too, Melbourne astrophotographer Markus Stone says.

"An old hut on a hiking trail, a lake at a campground reflecting the stars above, or even a friend's house in the sticks can all be great subjects, as long as it's fairly dark."

Timing a shot when the galactic core is not too high above the horizon, or tilting a lowered tripod to look up at an object, can create dramatic silhouettes against the Milky Way backdrop.

A woman wearing a puffer jacket, green beanie and green backpack crouches in front of a smartphone on a tripod outside at night.

Then there's "light painting", which illuminates objects in the foreground of a photo.

For this, you'll need another piece of equipment: a torch.

As a photo is being taken, briefly shine a light on the objects you wish to have illuminated in the final image.

A composite image of a rock silhouetted against the Milky Way, and the same rock lit up.

A second or less is usually all you need, and diffuse light tends to give better results than a spotlight-like torch. Shayne uses a palm-sized panel of LED lights which can be adjusted for brightness and warmth.

He also recommends setting up your shot to have the Milky Way's tail "pointing" at an object.

The Milky Way galaxy in the night sky, with a fence post, red dirt and dry grass illuminated in the foreground.

In winter, as the Earth spins, the Milky Way appears to rise in the evening and move across the sky during the night.

So if you don't want to stand outside all night, there are apps that let you plan your astrophotography excursion to make sure you're in the right place at the right time.

Those apps can also help you include other items of interest, such as the International Space Station traversing the sky.

Editing and extras

As this is a beginner's guide, I won't go into much more detail. But after getting the perfect shot — or shots — you might want to dip your toe in editing.

Apps can let you:

stitch photos together to make a panorama
remove haze and noise
increase clarity
adjust colour, exposure, contrast etc

To get an extra-wide-field view, you can buy lenses to put over your phone lens, but, Shayne says, this starts moving away from the simplicity of a smartphone-plus-tripod (and maybe torch) set-up.

And when should you invest in more gear, such as actual, proper cameras?

"[Using a smartphone] is a way to dip your toe in the water to see if you want to do astrophotography," Shayne says.

"It's the easiest and cheapest way to do it because you probably already have the phone.

"I tell people if you're happy to get out here at 2 o'clock in the morning, multiple times through the week, and then do it again next week, and then do it again next month and so forth, then go ahead and upgrade."

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August 9, 2024

Experiments Prepare to Test Whether Consciousness Arises from Quantum Weirdness

Researchers wish to probe whether consciousness has a basis in quantum mechanical phenomena

By Hartmut Neven & Christof Koch

Human brain, Neural network, Artificial intelligence and idea concept

nopparit/Getty Images

The brain is a mere piece of furniture in the vastness of the cosmos, subject to the same physical laws as asteroids, electrons or photons. On the surface, its three pounds of neural tissue seem to have little to do with quantum mechanics , the textbook theory that underlies all physical systems, since quantum effects are most pronounced on microscopic scales. Newly proposed experiments, however, promise to bridge this gap between microscopic and macroscopic systems, like the brain, and offer answers to the mystery of consciousness.

Quantum mechanics explains a range of phenomena that cannot be understood using the intuitions formed by everyday experience. Recall the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment , in which a cat exists in a superposition of states, both dead and alive. In our daily lives there seems to be no such uncertainty—a cat is either dead or alive. But the equations of quantum mechanics tell us that at any moment the world is composed of many such coexisting states, a tension that has long troubled physicists.

Taking the bull by its horns, the cosmologist Roger Penrose in 1989 made the radical suggestion that a conscious moment occurs whenever a superimposed quantum state collapses. The idea that two fundamental scientific mysteries—the origin of consciousness and the collapse of what is called the wave function in quantum mechanics—are related, triggered enormous excitement.

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Penrose’s theory can be grounded in the intricacies of quantum computation . Consider a quantum bit, a qubit, the unit of information in quantum information theory that exists in a superposition of a logical 0 with a logical 1. According to Penrose, when this system collapses into either 0 or 1, a flicker of conscious experience is created, described by a single classical bit.

Penrose, together with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, suggested that such collapse takes place in microtubules , tubelike, elongated structural proteins that form part of the cytoskeleton of cells, such as those making up the central nervous system.

These ideas have never been taken up by the scientific community as brains are wet and warm, inimical to the formation of superpositions, at least compared to existing quantum computers that operate at temperatures 10,000 times colder than room temperature to avoid destroying superposition states.

Penrose’s proposal suffers from a flaw when applied to two or more entangled qubits. Measuring one of these entangled qubits instantaneously reveals the state of the other one, no matter how far away. Their states are correlated, but correlation is not causation, and, according to standard quantum mechanics, entanglement cannot be employed to achieve faster-than-light communication. However, per Penrose’s proposal, qubits participating in an entangled state share a conscious experience. When one of them assumes a definite state, we could use this to establish a communication channel capable of transmitting information faster than the speed of light, a violation of special relativity.

In our view, the entanglement of hundreds of qubits, if not thousands or more, is essential to adequately describe the phenomenal richness of any one subjective experience: the colors, motions, textures, smells, sounds, bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts, shards of memories and so on that constitute the feeling of life itself.

In an article published in the open-access journal Entropy , we and our colleagues turned the Penrose hypothesis on its head, suggesting that an experience is created whenever a system goes into a quantum superposition rather than when it collapses. According to our proposal, any system entering a state with one or more entangled superimposed qubits will experience a moment of consciousness.

You, the astute reader, must by now be saying to yourself: But wait a minute here—I don’t ever consciously experience a superposition of states. Any one experience has a definitive quality; it is one thing and not the other. I see a particular shade of red, feel a toothache. I don’t simultaneously experience red and not-red, pain and not-pain.

The definitiveness of any conscious experience naturally arises within the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics . A metaphysical position first put forward by physicist Hugh Everett in 1957, the many-worlds view, posits time’s evolution as an enormously branched tree, with every possible outcome of a quantum event splitting off its own universe. A single qubit entering a superposition gives birth to two universes, in one of which the qubit’s state is 0 while in a twin universe everything is identical except that the qubit’s state is 1.

Entanglement potentially offers something else for brain scientists by providing a natural solution to what is called the binding problem, the subjective unity of every experience that has long posed a key challenge to the study of consciousness. Consider seeing the Statue of Liberty: her face, the crown on her head, the torch in her raised right hand, and so on. All these distinctions and relationships are bound together into a single perception whose substrate might be numerous qubits, all entangled with each other.

To make these esoteric ideas concrete, we propose three experiments that would increasingly shape our thinking on these matters. The first experiment, progressing right now thanks to funding from the Santa Monica–based Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, seeks to provide evidence of the relevance of quantum mechanics to neuroscience in two very accessible test beds: tiny fruit flies and cerebral organoids, the latter lentil-sized assemblies of thousands of neurons grown from human-induced pluripotent stem cells. It is known that the inert noble gas xenon can act as anesthetic in animals and people. Remarkably, an earlier experiment claimed that its anesthetic potency, measured as the concentration of the gas that induces immobility, depends on the specific isotopes of xenon. Two isotopes of an element contain the same number of positively charged protons but different numbers of noncharged neutrons in their nuclei. The chemical properties of isotopes—that is, what they interact with—are similar, by and large, even though their masses and magnetic properties differ slightly.

If fruit flies and organoids can be used to detect different xenon isotopes, the hunt will be on for the exact mechanisms by which a gas that is inert and that remains aloof from binding to proteins or other molecules achieves this. Is it the tiny difference in the mass of these isotopes (131 versus 132 nucleons) that makes the difference? Or is it their nuclear spin, a quantum mechanical property of the nucleus? These xenon isotopes differ substantially in their nuclear spin; some have zero spin and others 1 / 2 or 3 / 2 .

These xenon experiments will inform a second follow-on experiment in which we will attempt to couple qubits to brain organoids in a way that allows entanglement to spread between biological and technical qubits. The final experiment, which at this stage is still a purely conceptual one, aims to enhance consciousness by coupling engineered quantum states to a human brain in an entangled manner. The person may then experience an expanded state of consciousness like those accessed under the influence of ayahuasca or psilocybin.

Both quantum engineering and the design of brain-machine interfaces are progressing rapidly. It may not be beyond human ingenuity to directly probe and expand our conscious mind by making use of quantum science and technology.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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Plants Find Light Using Gaps Between Their Cells

January 31, 2024

Plants are not innately passive — seedlings actively orient themselves toward light, as shown in this time-lapse video, sped up 2,700 times. New research has revealed how plants can tell the direction light is shining from.

Josue Moura Romao/Nature in Motion

Introduction

On a shelf lined with terra cotta pots, herbs bend their stems toward the nearest window. In a field of golden wildflowers, leaves rotate with the path of the sun. In a dappled forest, vines twine up trees, reaching ever upward and away from the dark.

Since ancient times, plants’ ability to orient their eyeless bodies toward the nearest, brightest source of light — known today as phototropism — has fascinated scholars and generated countless scientific and philosophical debates. And over the past 150 years, botanists have successfully unraveled many of the key molecular pathways that underpin how plants sense light and act on that information.

Yet a critical mystery has endured. Animals use eyes — a complex organ of lenses and photoreceptors — to gain a detailed picture of the world around them, including the direction of light. Plants, biologists have established, possess a powerful suite of molecular tools for measuring illumination. But in the absence of obvious physical sensing organs like lenses, how do plants work out the precise direction from which light is coming?

Now, a team of European researchers has hit upon an answer. In a recent paper published in Science , they report that a roadside weed — Arabidopsis , a favorite of plant geneticists — uses the air spaces between its cells to scatter light, modifying the path of light passing through its tissues. In this way, the air channels create a light gradient that helps seedlings accurately determine where light is coming from.

By taking advantage of air channels to scatter light, plants sidestep the need for discrete organs like eyes in favor of a neater trick: the ability in effect to “see” with their whole bodies.

A Deep-Rooted Debate

Why and how plants orient themselves toward light has been the subject of fierce debate for well over 2,000 years. Early Greek philosophers argued that plants, like animals, were capable of sensation and movement, and even desire and intelligence. But later thinkers like Aristotle asserted that plants were innately passive, incapable of sensing their environment, much less moving with it. “Plants have neither sensation nor desire,” he wrote in On Plants . “These views we must repudiate as unsound.” For centuries, scholars tended to agree with him.

Left: A portrait of Charles Darwin later in life, balding with a white beard. Right: A line traces through a series of points, looping around itself several times before veering widely to the left and upward.

Charles Darwin (left) and his son Francis traced the movements of seedlings reacting to a shifting light source, and generated dozens of phototropic maps (right). Their hypothesis that explained how plants grow toward light was largely proved out.

AF Fotografie/Alamy Stock Photo; Popular Science Monthly Volume 18

It wasn’t until 1658 that the alchemist and natural philosopher Thomas Browne established phototropism as a fact by documenting that mustard seedlings growing in pots in a basement persistently oriented their growth toward an open window. But for more than two centuries thereafter, biologists continued to argue about how the plants did it, and whether they were responding to the sun’s light or its heat.

In 1880, Charles Darwin and his son Francis led experiments to describe a phototropic mechanism that was ultimately proved out. As described in The Power of Movement in Plants , the pair grew seedlings — plants that couldn’t yet perform photosynthesis, relying instead on stored energy from their seed — in a dark room. When blue light shone on them from a specific direction, the plants reached toward it. Then, as the Darwins moved the light around the room, they tracked the seedlings’ corresponding movements.

Based on their experiments, the Darwins suggested that seedlings were most light sensitive at the tip of the shoot, and that what they sensed there led to the production of some substance that influenced the direction of the plant’s growth. By the 1920s, botanists had settled on a comfortable consensus that elaborated on that model: that plants had light sensors at their tips and that they produced hormones (later identified as auxin) that encouraged more growth on their shaded sides, causing their stalks and leaves to bend toward light.

Like many great discoveries, this one opened up a new question: How exactly could plants sense light in the first place? They lacked any obvious sense organ. Researchers began to suspect that plants must have sophisticated sensory capabilities.

Molecular biologists took up the charge, showing that plants can measure and react to a far broader spectrum of light than we can with our animal eyes, even though they lack a specialized organ for perception. Five different families of photoreceptors, plus hormones and signal pathways, work together to dictate down to the cellular level the direction in which a plant builds new tissue — explaining how stems twist, turn and shoot upward as needed. These photoreceptors are spread throughout plant bodies but are largely concentrated in the inner tissue of the stem, said Christian Fankhauser , a plant biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and an author of the new study.

However, simple sensors aren’t enough on their own to give plants the ability to determine light’s direction. To best pinpoint the direction of strong illumination, a plant needs to be able to compare signals between different photoreceptors so that they can orient their growth toward the most intense light. And for that they need incoming light to fall onto their sensors in a gradient from brightest to dimmest.

Christian Fankhauser and Martina Legris stand smiling outside in the sun.

Christian Fankhauser (left) and Martina Legris were part of a team of plant biologists from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland who discovered how plants can physically scatter light to create a gradient across cells in their tissues.

Laure Allenbach

Animals have solved this problem through the development of eyes. A simple organism, such as a planarian worm, gets by with “eyespots” that merely sense the presence or absence of light. In more complex animal eyes like our own, anatomic features like the lens direct light toward the retina , which is packed with photosensors. The brain then compares the amount of light arriving through the curved lens with the amount registering on separate cells. This system, which combines physical manipulation of light with molecular sensors, allows for the detection of fine-grained gradients of brightness and shadow, and its resolution into the picture we call sight.

But since plants have no brain, they need a passive system for arriving at the same conclusions. That’s why plants’ ability to form physical gradients is important: They create inherent distinctions between cells without requiring the plant to make active comparisons.

Thus, botanists faced a conundrum. Was phototropism wholly a molecular process, as some suspected, or could plants alter light beams to create a gradient and better direct their response? If the latter was true, then plants must have physical structures that allow them to focus light.

That structure would finally be identified in a mutant version of a roadside weed that struggled to find the light.

The Blind Mutant

Thale cress — known to science as Arabidopsis thaliana — is not a particularly attractive plant. The 25-centimeter-tall weed is fond of disturbed land, field edges and the shoulders of roads. Native to Africa and Eurasia, it’s now found on every continent except Antarctica. Plant biologists have since adapted it to a scientific lifestyle: Its short life cycle, small genome ( fully mapped in 2000 ) and tendency to produce useful mutations in the lab all make it an excellent model organism for understanding plant growth and genetics.

Fankhauser has worked with Arabidopsis since 1995 to study how light shapes plant growth. In 2016, his lab screened the genes of seedlings to find mutant plants with unusual responses to light. They grew the seeds in a dark room with blue lights to direct the seedlings sideways. From there, the experiment ran more or less as the Darwins’ did 150 years ago: As the researchers changed the direction of the light, the plants reoriented themselves to it.

However, one mutant plant struggled. While it had no problem sensing gravity, it seemed unable to track light. Instead it bent in all directions, as if blind and feeling around in the dark.

Something had apparently gone wrong with the mutant’s ability to sense light. When the team examined the plant, they found it had the typical photoreceptors, according to the plant biologist Martina Legris, a postdoc in Fankhauser’s lab and co-author on the new paper. But when the team looked at the stem under the microscope, they noticed something strange.

A normal Arabidopsis seedling (right) bends toward light incoming from the right, while a mutant with water-flooded air channels (left) grows straight upward. Cross sections of the stems show why: Normal air channels create a gradient from brightness to darkness across the plant’s cells (shown here using fluorescent methods) that indicates the light’s direction. Mutant seedlings with water-flooded channels have no light gradient, and therefore can’t sense in which direction to grow.

Martina Legris; Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh9384. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

The wild Arabidopsis , like most plants, has air channels between its cells. These structures are like ventilation shafts woven around the sealed cellular compartments, and they are known to play important roles both in photosynthesis and in oxygenating cells. But the air channels of the mutant plant were flooded with water. The team tracked the mutation to the gene abcg5 , which produces a protein that may help waterproof the cell wall to ensure that the plant’s air shafts are watertight.

Intrigued, the researchers tried an experiment. They filled the intercellular air shafts of non-mutant plants with water to see whether this affected their growth. Like the mutants, these plants had a difficult time determining where the light was coming from. “We can see that these plants are genetically normal,” Legris said. “The only things they’re missing are these air channels.”

The researchers deduced that the plant orients itself to light through a mechanism based on the phenomenon of refraction — the tendency of light to change direction as it passes through different media. Because of refraction, Legris explained, light passing through a normal Arabidopsis will scatter under the surface of the stem: Every time it moves through a plant cell, which is mostly water, and then through an air channel, it changes direction. Since some of the light is redirected in the process, the air channels establish a steep light gradient across different cells, which the plant can use to assess the light’s direction and then grow toward it.

In contrast, when these air channels are filled with water, the scattering of light is reduced. Plant cells refract light in a similar way as a flooded channel, since they both contain water. Instead of scattering, the light passes almost straight through the cells and the flooded channels to deeper within the tissue, decreasing the light gradient and depriving the seedling of differences in light intensity.

Seeing the Light

The research suggests that these air channels play a critical role in helping young plants track light. Roger Hangarter , a plant biologist at Indiana University Bloomington, who was not involved in the new study, hailed it for finding a clever solution to a long-standing problem. Fankhauser, Legris and their colleagues “pretty well put the nail in the coffin on the importance of these air spaces,” he said.

The idea has come up before, Hangarter noted. In 1984, a team of researchers at the University of York suggested that air channels between plant cells might help establish the necessary light gradient. But since the team didn’t have the funding to carry out expensive experiments, their suggestion went untested.

“It was always baffling to us how these little, tiny — almost transparent — [embryonic plants] could detect a gradient,” Hangarter said. “We never really gave much credence to the air-space thing because we were distracted looking for molecules that were involved. You get on a certain research path, and you get blinders on.”

Over four hours (sped up in this time-lapse video), a week-old sunflower seedling bends when exposed to dim white light from the right. New research explains how air channels between the cells in its stem help it sense which direction to bend toward.

Roger Hangarter/Indiana University

The air-channel mechanism joins other ingenious devices that plants have evolved to control how light moves through them. For example, research by Hangarter helped establish that chloroplasts — the cellular organelles that perform photosynthesis — actively dance inside leaf cells to move light around. Chloroplasts can cluster greedily in the center of the cell to soak up weak light or flee to the margins to let stronger light pass deeper into plant tissues.

For now, the new findings about air channels extend only to seedlings. While these air channels also appear in adult leaves, where they’ve been shown to play a role in light scattering and distribution, nobody’s yet tested whether they play a role in phototropism, Legris said.

How long air channels have been playing this role is unclear. Primitive land-plant fossils from 400 million years ago show neither roots nor leaves — but the core tissues of the plants show quite large intercellular air spaces . Perhaps they arose initially for tissue aeration or gas exchange, Fankhauser said, and then were adapted to their role in phototropism. Or perhaps plants evolved air spaces in stems in part to help them sense light, and then co-opted them to perform other functions.

“Further understanding these structures — how they’re built, what is the mechanism behind them — is interesting for plant biologists beyond the question of how plants sense light direction,” Fankhauser said.

It could also help exorcise Aristotle’s ghost, which still lingers in people’s perceptions of plants, he said. “Many people have the feeling that plants are very passive organisms — they can’t anticipate anything; they just do what happens to them.”

But that idea is based in our expectations of what eyes should look like. Plants, it turns out, have evolved a way of seeing with their whole bodies, one woven into the gaps between their cells. They don’t need anything so clumsy as a pair of eyes to follow the light.

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A mutant seedling revealed how plant tissues scatter incoming light, allowing plants to sense its direction and move toward it.

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11 Fun Sense of Sight Activities for Preschoolers

1. Read & Discuss: Arlo Needs Glasses

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