The senses

Multisensory activities can be stimulating and help learners to make different useful associations with new language. They can also encourage teachers to support learning with a variety of activity types. Try a selection of activities and see how well your learners respond.

Materials

• Boxes
• Household objects with distinctive shapes e.g. sellotape, bananas
• Play-dough
• Foods
• Tea towels
• A tray
• Coloured card
• Containers
• Rice / pasta

Touch

• What’s in the box?
  Place a number of small objects in a box and cover with a tea towel. In turns the children have to put their hand in the box, describe the object to the class and they have to guess what it is. Use a range of objects which are different shapes and materials.
• Craft corners with play-dough, sand, rice, blocks
  Depending on the space you have available you can set up craft corners. They could spend five to ten minutes in each play station creating buildings, shapes, animals etc. Develop their language before and during the activities so that they can describe what they create. Use their objects to tell stories.
• Back drawing
  In pairs they can draw simple pictures or shapes on their partner’s back and their partner has to guess what they’ve drawn.

Taste

• Tastes like…
  Bring in a selection of common and unusual foods. Check first about the possibility of doing this especially if your learners have allergies. Give them the language they need to describe each food such as; sweet, sour, salty, fruity etc. This could be a secret tasting where they can’t see what they’re tasting. 

Sight

• Kim’s game
  This is a classic which works on observation techniques. Have a selection of everyday objects and lay them on a tray. Show all the objects to the children. Remove one without them seeing which one and then once again show the tray. They have to say which object is missing.
• Colours
  Some children could be colour blind so don’t assume that the difficulties they have with colours is always related to the language itself. Otherwise, once you’ve established their ability with colours, use colours to code new language. You could set up a system of introducing new language always using the same colour card depending on the type of word it is. So for example all nouns are displayed on red card, all adjectives on blue, all verbs on yellow etc. This will help you and the children when later on working at sentence level.

Hearing

• Sounds like...
  Make a series of noises: coughing, laughing, opening and closing the door, stamping, turning the pages of a book etc. The children all have their eyes closed while you make the noises. In pairs they discuss what noises they heard. Repeat. Then feedback as a class to how many noises they heard and with the older ones, what order. The younger ones can reproduce the noises if they don’t have the language.
• Visualisation
  With their eyes closed they have to listen to you while you describe a scene. When you have finished they can draw what they heard.
• Shaking cans
  Fill a selection of containers with rice and pasta shapes. Let the children experiment with the different noises they make in the various containers. The language here could be ‘loud’, ‘quiet’, ‘full’, ‘empty’.
• Animal noises
  Show pictures of animals to the children and ask them to make the appropriate noises. Show to one child who must make the noise and the others guess.

Smell

• Smells like…
  In the same way as with the taste activity you could cover up a selection of objects and have the children guess what they can smell. Examples are flowers, lemon, soap, bananas, perfume etc.

All five senses

• Senses poem
  Why not create a senses poem with your class. Remember to keep them simple and have a straightforward framework that the children can work with. Once you have created a class poem they could create their own.
  For example:

Title ___________ (a feeling e.g. happiness) is ___________ (a colour)

It sounds like a ___________

It smells like a ___________

It tastes like a ___________

It looks like a ___________

It feels like a ___________