Science · 3rd Year

Active learning ideas

Our Amazing Senses

Take your pupils on a fascinating journey of self-discovery as they explore the five amazing tools they use every minute of every day to understand their world.

• NCCA Curriculum Specifications
• NCCA: Primary School Curriculum, Science - Strand: Living things - Strand unit: Human life (3rd/4th Class)

• 20–45 min
• Pairs → Whole Class
• 3 activities

Activity 01

• Mystery Object
• 45 min · Small Groups

Sensory Stations

Set up five stations around the classroom, one for each sense. For example, a 'touch' station with mystery boxes containing different textures, a 'smell' station with unnamed scent pots, and a 'hearing' station with sound-making objects behind a screen.

Identify the five senses and the body part associated with each.

Facilitation Tip

Rotate the groups every 5-7 minutes to maintain engagement and pace.

What to look for

Observe pupils during sensory station activities, listening for their use of descriptive vocabulary and their ability to link a sense to its function.

• Understand
• Analyze
• Evaluate
• Self-Management
• Social Awareness

Activity 02

• Mystery Object
• 20 min · Pairs

The Nose Knows Taste Test

Pupils taste small, identical-looking pieces of apple and pear. They first taste them while holding their nose, then again without holding their nose, to discover how much smell contributes to flavour.

Explain how our senses help keep us safe from danger.

Facilitation Tip

Ensure you have checked for any food allergies before beginning this activity.

What to look for

Pupils complete a 'My Senses' worksheet where they match each sense to its body part and draw a picture of something they can perceive with that sense.

• Understand
• Analyze
• Evaluate
• Self-Management
• Social Awareness

Activity 03

• Mystery Object
• 30 min · Whole Class

Safety Sense Walk

Take the pupils for a walk around the school grounds or local area. Ask them to identify things they see, hear, or smell that help to keep them safe, such as a fire alarm, a stop sign, or the smell of baking from the school kitchen.

Compare the sense of smell in humans to that of an animal like a dog.

Facilitation Tip

Use a clipboard and have pupils tally the 'safety senses' they find.

What to look for

Pupils use a 'fist to five' rating (fist for no understanding, five fingers for full understanding) to show their confidence in explaining how senses keep us safe.

• Understand
• Analyze
• Evaluate
• Self-Management
• Social Awareness

A few notes on teaching this unit

Start with a whole-class discussion to see what pupils already know. Use concrete, hands-on activities like mystery boxes and sound games to make learning tangible and fun. Provide word banks with sensory adjectives (e.g., 'crunchy', 'smooth', 'faint', 'sweet') to help pupils articulate their observations.

Through these hands-on activities, your pupils will be able to confidently name their five senses, explain what each one does, and give examples of how they work together.

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Watch Out for These Misconceptions

• Taste only happens on the tongue.

  Our tongue detects basic tastes like sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, but most of what we call 'flavour' comes from our sense of smell working together with our sense of taste.

• We only have five senses.

  While sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch are the five main senses we learn about, our bodies also have other senses, like the sense of balance that helps us stand up and the sense of temperature.

• Our eyes see things perfectly like a camera.

  Our eyes collect information using light, but it is our brain that puts the signals together to make the picture that we 'see'. Sometimes our brain can even be tricked by optical illusions.

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Methods used in this brief

• Mystery Object