Start by telling the children that our sense of touch allows us to identify how different things feel. Call on children to come to the front of the room and feel items you have concealed in individual bags. Create a word bank of descriptive words. Then divide students into pairs. Give students other concealed items and let them try to identify them by touch and texture. Students can take turns trying to guess items.
This activity is similar, but you will introduce the sense of smell. Make sure there are no allergies before conducting this experiment. Put items in small brown bags that have small pin-sized holes. Ideas include: chocolate, cotton balls soaked in lemon or orange juice, soap or cheese, or a cotton ball soaked in shampoo or detergent. Let children work in pairs to guess the contents of the bag by smelling it.
Tell the children that plants need different things to survive. Talk about how plants like sunlight and water. Give children celery sticks with leaves and let them mix some food coloring with water. Have them put the celery in the water--by the next day, they will see it change color from the water it has absorbed. Talk about what happened in class.
If you are growing plants in class, ask children to observe which direction the plants are leaning. Are they growing towards or away from the sun? Rotate the plants and observe what happens by the end of the week.
Introduce the primary colors and show the children how they can be mixed to create other colors. Let the children experiment with paints to create their own palate of mixed colors. Provide children with prefilled droppers of color and let them follow your lead as you add a specified number of drops to mix colors. Give children a color chart so they can paint it on their own personal color wheel.
Give each pair of students baby jars with the same amount of the same color drops in each. Have children add different water amounts so they learn how color intensity lessens with greater amounts of water. You can pre-measure the water that goes in each jar so children can simply pour in the water, screw on the lid, and shake. They will have fun shaking up the jars of colored water to get four different shades.