Homeschool Unit Study: Five Senses

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Humans have five senses: taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing. Your senses gather information about the world and send messages to your brain through your nervous system. Your brain organizes all that information to allow you to protect yourself, learn new things, and enjoy the world around you.

Taste comes from the taste buds, or papillae (puh-PILL-ee), on your tongue. You have about 10,000 taste buds, and they are replaced every couple of weeks. Your tongue can only taste four flavors: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Everything you taste is a combination of these flavors!

Smell comes from your nose. Tiny odor molecules in the air get into your nose when you breathe. Millions of small hairs on the inside of your nose recognize the molecules and send signals to your brain about the smells.

Did you know your sense of taste doesn’t work as well without your sense of smell? You taste food using both! That’s why food doesn’t taste as good when you have a stuffy nose.

Sight comes from your eyes. The lens on the front of your eyeball focuses pictures on the back of your eye. The pictures are sent to your brain along the optic nerve - upside down! Your brain has to turn the picture right side up to make sense of what you’re seeing!

Touch comes from nerve endings in your skin, and your fingers have more nerve endings than any other part of your body. Each nerve ending can recognize just one type of sensation: heat, cold, pain, and contact. Each sensation has its own path to your brain, so when your brain gets all the messages, it has to figure out how all the sensations fit together and what they mean.

Hearing comes from your ears. Your outer ear collects sounds and moves them into your ear canal, toward the middle ear. Your middle ear turns sounds into vibrations and sends them to your inner ear. Then, the inner ear changes the vibrations into nerve signals for the brain to receive.

Your five senses and your brain work together to help you understand your world!