THERE ARE 5 SENSES

1. SIGHT2. HEARING3. SMELL4. TOUCH5. TASTE

Hearing

Seeing

TouchingTasting

Smelling

SIGHT• Sight means your

ability to see.• We use 2 parts of

our body to see.• Your eye is a

complicated organ made of many parts that work together

• When we think of sight many of us think of the eyes first

• But did you know the brain is just as important to seeing as the eyes?

SIGHT CONT.• The parts of the eye

work like a camera.• They take pictures

of the things we see• These pictures are

turned into message that are sent to the brain

• Like a picture these messages are processed, allowing us to see the world around us

http://kidshealth.org/kid/htbw/eyes.html

Optical Illusion

Sense of Taste

Have you ever thought about why foods taste different? It's really quite amazing. Your tongue and the roof of your mouth are covered with thousands of tiny taste buds. When you eat something, the saliva in your mouth helps break down your food. This causes the receptor cells located in your tastes buds to send messages through sensory nerves to your brain. Your brain then tells you what flavors you are tasting.

Taste buds probably play the most important part in helping you enjoy the many flavors of food. Your taste buds can recognize four basic kinds of tastes: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. The salty/sweet taste buds are located near the front of your tongue; the sour taste buds line the sides of your tongue; and the bitter taste buds are found at the very back of your tongue.

• Everyone's tastes are different. In fact, your tastes will change as you get older. When you were a baby, you had taste buds, not only on your tongue, but on the sides and roof of your mouth. This means you were very sensitive to different foods. As you grew, the taste buds began to disappear from the sides and roof of your mouth, leaving taste buds mostly on your tongue. As you get older, your taste buds will become even less sensitive, so you will be more likely to eat foods that you thought were too strong as a child.

We have almost 10,000 taste buds inside our mouths; even on the roofs of our mouths.

Insects have the most highly developed sense of taste. They have taste organs on their feet, antennae, and mouthparts.

Fish can taste with their fins and tail as well as their mouth.

In general, girls have more tastebuds than boys.Taste is the weakest of the five senses.

As an Out-of-School Project - Find Out More About Your Sense of TasteAt home this evening with the assistance of your parents, do the following activities and write two sentences about your experience in your spiral notebooks. Wipe your tongue with a towel so that it is dry. Now put a little

sugar on the dry part. You will not be able to taste it. Your tongue must be wet for your taste buds to work!

Put some salt water on the back of your tongue. You can hardly taste it. Now put it on the front. It tastes very salty. Different taste buds are located on different parts of your tongue. So tastes are stronger in some spots than in others.

Your sense of smell helps you taste things. Hold your nose tight so that you can't smell anything. Now put a piece of onion on your tongue. You can barely taste it. But as soon as you let go of your nose you'll find that the taste seems much stronger.

Sense of Hearing

Like your other sense organs, your ears are extremely well-designed. In fact, they serve two very important purposes. Do you know what they are? You were probably able to figure out that your ears help you to hear sounds, but what you probably did not know is that your ears also help you to keep your balance.

How You HearWhen an object makes a noise, it sends vibrations (better known as sound waves) speeding through the air. These vibrations are then funneled into your ear canal by your outer ear. As the vibrations move into your middle ear, they hit your eardrum and cause it to vibrate as well. This sets off a chain reaction of vibrations. Your eardrum, which is smaller and thinner than the nail on your pinky finger, vibrates the three smallest bones in your body: first, the hammer, then the anvil, and finally, the stirrup. The stirrup passes the vibrations into a coiled tube in the inner ear called the cochlea.

www.shelledy.mesa.K12.co.us (Show video)

The fluid-filled cochlea contains thousands of hair-like nerve endings called cilia. When the stirrup causes the fluid in the cochlea to vibrate, the cilia move. The cilia change the vibrations into messages that are sent to the brain via the auditory nerve. The auditory nerve carries messages from 25,000 receptors in your ear to your brain. Your brain then makes sense of the messages and tells you what sounds you are hearing.

How You Keep Your BalanceNear the top of the cochlea are three loops called the semi-circular canals. The canals are full of liquid also. When you move your head, the liquid moves. It pushes against hairlike nerve endings, which send messages to your brain. From these messages, your brain can tell whether or how your body is moving.

If you have ever felt dizzy after having spun around on a carnival ride, it was probably because the liquid inside the semicircular canals swirled around inside your ears. This makes the hairs of the sensory cells bend in all different directions, so the cells' signals confuse your brain.

What Did You Say?Did you know that some people have trouble hearing and others cannot hear at all? Well it's true. When a person can't hear well, a hearing aide can sometimes help them hear better. However, people who are entirely deaf have to rely on all their other senses to help process all of the information from the world around them. They are deaf because of an illness or they were born that way. You can also lose your ability to hear at an early age by listening to things that are very loud.

• Babies can get earaches because of milk backing up in the Eustachian tube, which causes bacteria to grow and may cause hearing problems later in life.

• When you go up to high elevations, the change in pressure causes your ears to pop.• Children have more sensitive ears than adults. They can recognize a wider variety of noises.• Dolphins have the best sense of hearing among animals. They are able to hear 14 times better than

humans.• Animals hear more sounds than humans.• An earache is caused by too much fluid putting pressure on your eardrum. Earaches are often the result of

an infection, allergies or a virus.

Imagine This!

On a piece of paper, list some of the things you hear from the following sound machine. In your spiral notebooks, write either a paragraph or a poem. Describe what you hear and what it might look like. Make it so that someone else could see and hear it.

Smell• You smell as you breathe in air through your

nose. As the air goes through your nose to your lungs, nerve endings in your nose detect any smells.

Touch• You touch & feel things with your skin• You have more pain nerve endings

than any other type.• Your sense of touch helps you to

learn about size, shape, texture and temperature

• When you touch something, touch receptors and nerve endings send signals along nerves to your brain. If you touch ice, touch receptors send messages to your brain to tell you that ice is very cold and hard.

State Standards• STATE GOAL 23. Understand human body systems and factors that influence growth and development.• Why This Goal Is Important: To achieve healthful individual development, students need to understand human anatomy

and physiology, nutrition, stages of growth and development, avoidance of harmful actions and the characteristics of good health habits. Early learners begin with basic recognition of body systems and growth stages. As students progress, they understand how systems work together and how individual actions affect health. As they themselves grow and develop, students can learn to enhance the process throughout their school years and later life.

• A. Describe and explain the structure and functions of the human body systems and how they interrelate.• EARLY ELEMENTARY• LATE ELEMENTARY

23.A.1 Identify basic parts of body systems and their functions (e.g., heart, lungs, eyes).• 23.A.2 Identify basic body systems and their functions (e.g., circulatory, respiratory, nervous

Resources

www.librarythinkquest.org

www.shelledy.mesa.K12co.us

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/chtouch.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/3750/touch/touch.html

Landau, E. (2009). A true book: the sense of touch. New York: Children’s Press.

Vocabulary WordsReceptorSensory Nerves

VibrationsSound wavesEardrumHammerAnvilStirrupCochleaCiliaAuditory NerveSemi-circular canalsEustachian tube