Three Activities to Learn About the Sense of Sight

Preschoolers love to learn about the five senses.  This theme is hugely appropriate as it can be very play based and hands-on while also being educational.  Although we learned about all five sense in our unit, today I am sharing three creative ideas to teach preschoolers about the sense of sight.

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Exploring the Sense of Sight with Homemade Binoculars

One of our most popular activities while exploring our sense of sight was making binoculars our of cardboard tubes.  The purpose of this was to help the students focus what they were seeing by limiting their vision a little bit.  We first painted the binoculars, then wrapped a contrasting color of yarn around them for added decoration.  I used hot glue to secure the yarn, and also added a piece around one end to serve as a neck strap.

Once the binoculars were dry and the hot glue was cooled, I took my preschoolers into the backyard to do some exploring.

We investigated the cherry tomato plants, as well as the grass and toys from the sand box.  We looked up close at some flowers, too, and took a deep, long look at the beets growing in my vegetable garden.

It was requested that I pick a beet and serve it up for snack time, which I did, but only Corinne ate hers.  My kids and I love to eat beets, even raw, but the other preschoolers were not at all impressed.

Exploring the Sense of Sight with an Eye Patch

To begin this activity, I invited my students to participate in some fine motor practice by matching large, plastic nuts and bolts.  Without an eye patch, this activity is perfectly appropriate for my 3-4’s class as it is just the right amount of challenging.  Students have to at least match up the right sizes of the nuts and bolts, and they can even challenge themselves more by matching shape and color as well.

After the students had about 15 minutes of this activity, we had a short discussion about what we knew of our sense of sight.  I challenged the students to think about why we have two eyes and what is might be like to only have one eye.  Thus, the eye patch.  I placed an eye patch on each student and then invited them to do the nuts and bolts activity again.

As you might expect, it was much more difficult to do a fine motor activity with the vision from only one eye.  In fact, one of my students got so frustrated by his limited sight and lack of depth perception that he finally flipped up his eye patch and hollered, “I can’t see!  I can’t see with this eye patch!”

Exploring the Sense of Sight with a Magnifying Glass

One more activity that we did to explore our sense of sight was to use a magnifying glass to look closely at some flowers.

I love how this student’s nose is squished up against the magnifying glass.  Too cute!  I challenged students to look at the flowers through their magnifying glass at varying distances.

While the students viewed the flowers through their magnifying glass, I asked them to also describe what they were seeing.  Responses ranged from, “It’s really bigger!” to “I see some pollen!”

Books We Read

Following are some books we read about the five senses, as well as some specifically relating to the sense of sight.