Organizing Topic — Investigating the Five Senses

2. Talk about taste buds and their job. Tell students that today they are going to complete a taste test
and see if they can learn more about their taste buds.
3. Pass out the science bags. Have students carefully open their bags, pull out the science mat, and
arrange the food items on it. Have them add the pickle slices to their collection. Talk about and
demonstrate nibbling — a small taste of food.
4. Give students a few minutes to nibble each food item and think about its taste. Ask students to
group items together based on their tongue’s reaction to each item’s taste.
Observations and Conclusions
1. Watch and listen as students nibble and group the food items.
2. Discuss why the students put foods in certain groups. Have them share descriptors, such as sweet,
salty, sour, and bitter. Talk about which part of their tongue reacts to each taste.
3. Have students draw an oversized tongue in their journal and color each of the four sections with a
different color. Then have them draw some foods that are tasted by the various parts of the tongue,
using the appropriate color to draw each food item:
• Sweet — cookies, sugar cube
• Salty — chips, pretzels
• Sour — lemon, dill pickle
• Bitter — unsweetened chocolate, grapefruit rind
Sample assessment
• Have students use four index cards to make sweet, sour, bitter, and salty voting cards. Call out
common foods that your children have tasted, and have students show the card that describes the
taste of the food shown. These cards can be made in advance with a corresponding picture to help
students recognize the words.
• Have students complete the four-column chart (see next page) by filling in pictures of foods that
are sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Students can draw the foods or cut pictures from magazines to fill
the boxes.
Follow-up/extension
• Have a tasting party — a “sweets” or “sour” or “salty” party with various foods that can be
described in that way.
Resources
• Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K–12. National Science Teachers Association
(NSTA). http://www.nsta.org/ostbc.
• Search for Literature: Literature for Science and Mathematics. California Department of
Education. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/sc/ll/ap/searchlist.asp. Web site with searchable database.
Virginia Department of Education
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