Summer Camp Recap: My Five Senses

By Carolyn Carlins, Facilitator, Science Education and Research

Summer Camp Recap is our weekly seasonal segment featuring our summer camp programs. This is the place for camp parents to find pictures of their campers in action and see the fun things we did all week. It’s also a great place for educators to pick up craft, story and lesson ideas for their own early childhood programs.

This past week at Phipps, our Little Sprout campers explored all of their senses through a variety of songs, crafts and, of course, plants! We smelled fragrant flowers, felt the different textures of plants and listened to the sounds of bullfrogs. By the end of the week, everyone learned a lot about the different sizes, shapes, flavors and smells that plants come in.

On Monday, we focused on sight. We saw big seeds, small seeds, colorful seeds, round seeds and more! Next, we tested out some magnifying glasses and made binoculars to improve our eyesight. We finished the day by searching the CSL Green Roof for yarn worms.

Tuesday was full of smells! From rosemary and lemon balm to cinnamon and coffee, we smelled our way through the conservatory. These Little Sprouts even got to plant their own wonderfully smelly plants — basil and tomato!

On Wednesday, we explored touch. Campers touched some soft and smooth plants in the Conservatory. Using our fingers and sponges, we painted t-shirts to remember the different senses we talked about at camp.

For the final day of camp, everyone got to be a musician. We played different instruments made of seeds, beads and gourds. Outside in the CSL landscape, we listened to the sounds of seed pods, waterfalls, birds and frogs. To wrap up the week, campers made a puppet to help us sing our goodbye song!

Keep exploring the five senses with these books:

Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert
Polar Bear, Polar Bear What Do You Hear? by Bill Martin Jr.
My Five Senses by Aliki
You Smell and Taste and Feel and See by Mary Murphy

Mystery Sound Matching Game:

Collect small, opaque containers and put different items inside- coins, legos, sand, rocks, jingle bells, etc. Put each item in two separate containers, and have your Little Sprout match the identical sounds by shaking the containers and using their ears! Or, just mix them up and guess what’s inside!