Although children may be aware of different types of music, they may not be conscious of how sounds make people feel. Incorporate music and art together by creating musical paintings. Give children large sheets of paper and crayons or paint. Play a piece of music and ask children to paint along with what they feel. When you play slow, classical music, many children will paint slow brushstrokes. Change to dance music, and many children will start painting frantically. At the end, ask children how their bodies felt when they heard these different sounds.
One of the most important lessons preschoolers should learn is how to write the alphabet, and removing sight can help you track how well they're learning. Ask them to close their eyes and write letters onto paper. This exercise helps preschoolers practice forming letters by memory rather than worrying about what the letter looks like. For fun, you can also ask children to draw pictures onto their papers. They'll be amused at how silly their drawings look when they remove their blindfolds.
Although children may not use their sense of smell much beyond meal times, animals rely heavily on smell to find food and track the movements of other animals. Pretending to smell like animals do will amuse preschoolers and teach them how animals live. Soak cotton balls in vanilla extract. Ask children to smell the cotton, then ask them to smell the cotton the way that dogs would. Demonstrate by putting your nose right over the bowl and sniffing deeply and quickly. Ask children what happened. They should realize that smelling like an animal made the scent much stronger.
Even very familiar objects can be difficult to identify using only the sense of touch. Collect a variety of small objects from the classroom such as a beanbag, a marker, a page of stickers and a plastic block. Place each item in a sock or a paper bag, and pass the bags around for children to touch. They may first feel the outside of the container, then reach their hands inside. When each child's had a turn, ask children to guess the contents of each sock.
Taste can be one of the most enjoyable senses for food-loving preschoolers to study. Taste activities can also encourage picky eaters to experiment with new flavors. Challenge children to a blind taste test by covering their eyes with a blindfold and handing them spoonfuls of foods to taste. Use a variety of flavors, such as sweet jelly, salty pretzels and mildly spicy salsa. Ask children to guess what food they're tasting and label it as sour, sweet, spicy or salty.