Exploring the five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch) offers children a gateway to understanding how they perceive and interact with the world around them.
For children, exploring these senses can be an exciting adventure, filled with discovery and learning.
By crafting experiences that involve the five senses, educators and parents can provide a rich educational environment that encourages curiosity and active learning.
This collection of sensory activities invites kids to dive into the wonders of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch through engaging, hands-on experiences.
These five senses activities are more than just fun and games; they are thoughtfully designed to integrate learning with sensory stimulation.
From scent-matching games to texture explorations, these activities transform abstract sensory concepts into tangible learning opportunities.
1. Mr. Potato Head’s Five Senses Adventure
Mr. Potato Head’s 5 Senses Adventure offers a hands-on approach, allowing children to explore sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell through interactive play.
By utilizing familiar characters, this activity promotes sensory awareness and encourages creativity, helping young learners make connections between their experiences and the environment.
Learn more: A Little Pinch of Perfect
2. Sensory Tray Play
Sensory tray play is an innovative way to immerse preschoolers in hands-on experiences that engage their five senses. By setting up trays filled with various materials and items that correspond to each sense, educators can create a rich, interactive learning environment.
Learn more: The Preschool Tool Box Blog
3. Stick and Feel
By tracing their hands on activity sheets and sticking various textured materials—like soft cotton, rough sandpaper, or smooth foil—onto each finger, children actively engage their sense of touch in a hands-on way.
Learn more: Butter Flo Kids
4. Five Senses Popsicle Puppets
Children can use these puppets in storytelling, exploring real-life items, or even role-playing as they connect senses to everyday experiences.
Learn more: Simple Everyday Mom
5. DIY Water Xylophone Activity
By filling clear glasses or jars with varying levels of water, children can create a range of pitches when they gently tap each one with a spoon or mallet.
Learn more: Kindergarten Worksheet and Games
6. Sound Eggs
By filling plastic eggs with different materials like rice, beans, sand, or small bells, each egg produces a unique sound when shaken, allowing children to discover how various materials create different noises.
Learn more: Play to Learn Preschool
7. Exploring Textures
Creating a touch board filled with a variety of textures offers preschoolers an immersive way to explore their sense of touch.
By attaching materials like soft felt, bumpy bubble wrap, rough sandpaper, and smooth satin onto a board, children can feel and compare textures, enhancing their tactile awareness.
Learn more: Pre K Pages
8. Apple Taste Test
The Apple Taste Test is a delicious activity that introduces preschoolers to the sense of taste while also exploring concepts of flavor and comparison.
Learn more: Play to Learn Preschool US
9. Five Senses Craft with Paper Plates
The Five Senses Paper Plate Craft is a fun and engaging activity that helps preschoolers learn about each of the five senses through hands-on art. Using paper plates as faces, children can add features representing sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch.
Learn more: Pinterest/Missy Crepps
10. Mystery Touch Boxes
Each box holds a mystery item hidden from sight, and children reach in to feel and guess what it might be. Items like soft cotton balls, rough pinecones, or squishy sponges create a range of textures for them to explore.
Learn more: Pre Kinders
11. Exploring Textures
By filling a shallow tray or tub with hydrated Orbeez, children can take off their shoes and walk across the squishy, bouncy surface. This unique experience provides a captivating contrast to other textures like sand, grass, or soft fabric mats.
Learn more: Teaching Mama Org
12. Cut and Paste Face Activity
By providing various cut-out features—such as eyes, noses, mouths, and hair—children can mix and match to create unique faces on paper or cardboard.
Learn more: Pinterest/Sweet Dee
13. Listening Ear Crafts
Using materials like paper plates, construction paper, and craft supplies, children can create large, colorful ears that can be decorated with textures or drawings representing sounds they enjoy, such as music notes, animals, or nature sounds.
Learn more: Mama Jenn
14. Build A Flower Five Senses Match
The Build a Flower Five Senses Match activity allows preschoolers to explore the five senses in a creative and interactive way.
Using colorful flower templates, children can create their own flowers by adding elements that correspond to each senses.
Learn more: Frog and Fairies
15. DIY Tongue and Taste Exploration
By creating a large paper or cardboard tongue, children can add items that represent different flavors—such as sweet fruits (like strawberries), sour candies (like lemon slices), salty snacks (like fries), and bitter herbs (like bitter gourd).
Learn more: Pinterest/Escarlin Tejada
16. Mystery Egg
By filling some eggs with various materials such as rice, beans, or bells and leaving others empty, children can shake and listen to each egg to identify whether it makes a sound or remains silent.
Learn more: Home Learning from Birth
17. Exploring Our Sense of Taste
Using materials like paper plates or cardboard, children can craft a mouth with teeth and a colorful tongue that represents different taste sensations sweet, sour, salty and bitter.
Learn more: Pinterest
18. Five Senses Flip Book
By creating a flip book with individual pages dedicated to each sense of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell children can illustrate their understanding of each sense using drawings, pictures, or materials.
Learn more: Teaches Pay Teachers
19. Outdoor Little Detectives
By crafting binoculars that they can decorate and personalize, children are inspired to investigate the world around them, enhancing their observational skills.
Learn more: Stay At Home Educator
20. Smelling Sensory Bottles
Smelling Sensory Bottles provide a fun and interactive way for preschoolers to explore their sense of smell while engaging in hands-on learning. By filling clear bottles with various scented materials such as vanilla, grapefruit, or fragrant flowers children can shake and sniff each bottle to identify the different scents.
Learn more: Things to Share and Remember
21. Smell Exploration Made Fun
By filling each cup with various scented items such as citrus peels, vanilla extract, coffee grounds, or essential oils children can take turns sniffing each cup and guessing the scent.
Learn more: Learn Play Imagine
22. Outdoor Five Senses Activities
By cutting holes in the center of paper plates, children can create “viewers” for sight, encouraging them to look closely at nature leaves, flowers, insects while filtering out distractions.
Learn more: How We Learn
23. Sensory Hat
The Sensory Hat Crown is a delightful and interactive activity that allows preschoolers to explore their sense of touch while fostering creativity. Designed like a crown, this sensory hat features various tactile materials to represent facial features such as eyes, a nose, ears, and a mouth.
Learn more: Pinterest/Ozlem Solmaz
24. Guess The Flavor of the Jelly Beans
By sampling a variety of jelly beans without knowing their flavors beforehand, children are encouraged to rely on their sense of taste and smell to make educated guesses.
Learn more: Stay at Home Educator
25. DIY Whisper Phone
As they speak into one end, their voices travel through the pipe, illustrating the concept of sound waves in an engaging manner.
Learn more: OZ Little Teacher
26. Learning Senses Through Art
By drawing and painting while blindfolded, children are encouraged to rely on their other senses, such as touch and hearing, to create their artwork. This activity fosters a sense of freedom and experimentation, as they must navigate the textures of the paint and the canvas without visual cues.
Learn more: Saddle Up for 2nd Grade
27. Sensory Sorting
Using a sorting board with designated areas for each sense, children can use Velcro to attach corresponding items, images, or labels like a feather for touch, a flower for smell, a telephone for hearing, a picture of food for taste, and a colorful object for sight.
Learn more: Pinterest
28. A Five Senses Listening Walk Adventure
As they stroll through parks, gardens, or playgrounds, children are encouraged to listen carefully and identify various sounds, such as rustling leaves, chirping birds, distant laughter, or the sound of a gentle breeze.
Learn more: Teach Preschool Org
29. Mystery Sensory Box
This element of surprise encourages curiosity and enhances their descriptive language as they articulate the textures they experience. To make the activity more interactive, children can take turns guessing the items based on touch alone
Learn more: How We Learn
30. Scratch & Sniff
By mixing fragrant substances such as essential oils or spices with glue and glitter, children can create textured art pieces that release delightful scents when scratched.
Learn more: Fun A Day
31. Scent Hunt
Children sniff each cotton pad and match it to the corresponding animal picture, encouraging them to think critically about scent associations in nature.
Learn more: Pre Kinders
32. Discovering the Five Organs Project
This project features a box with a stick protruding from the center, onto which children can place circular cardboard cutouts, each displaying a picture of an organ associated with one of the senses.
Learn more: Pinterest/Rukmini
33. Feel the Difference
Each child receives a mini handprint cutout on which they can attach a piece of fabric or material with a unique texture, such as soft cotton, rough burlap, silky ribbon, or bumpy bubble wrap.
Once completed, these textured handprints create a “feely wall” or collection, allowing children to touch and compare various sensations
Learn more: Mandee and Brandy Blogspot
34. Rainbow Discovery Bottles
Filled with luminous Orbeez in the colors of the rainbow, these bottles offer children a visual and sensory treat as they watch the Orbeez swirl, bounce, and glow.
Learn more: Play to Learn Preschool
35. Exploring Nature with the Five Senses
Equipped with a checklist, children set out on an outdoor adventure where they seek out specific sensory experiences linked to sight, sound, touch, smell, and, if safe, taste.
Learn more: Childhood 101
36. Candy Taste Test With Chocolate
By sampling different types of chocolate such as milk, dark, and white children explore the subtle flavor differences between each type, learning to identify sweetness, bitterness, creaminess, and other taste profiles.
Learn more: Little Bins for Little Hands
37. Shadow Puppet
By using simple cutouts or hand shadows, children discover how light sources create shadows, allowing them to explore the relationship between light, object, and surface.
Learn more: Little Bins for Little Hands
38. Mystery Touch Bag
The Mystery Touch Bag is an interactive activity that encourages preschoolers to use their sense of touch to identify hidden objects.
Filled with items of various textures such as a soft cotton ball, rough sandpaper, smooth stone, or fuzzy pom-pom the bag invites children to reach in without looking and guess what they feel.
Learn more: Little Bins for Little Hands
39. Hot or Cold?
This activity is a fun and simple way for children to explore temperature differences and enhance their understanding of their sensory experiences with hot and cold.
Learn more: Pinterest/Kelebek
40. Spice Painting With Scented Paint
This act combines creativity with sensory exploration, allowing preschoolers to engage their sense of smell while creating art.
Spice Painting with Scented Paint is a wonderful way for children to explore their senses in a fun and memorable way.
Learn more: Little Bins for Little Hands