Composting – Practical Task

For this lesson’s practical, you will be designing and making your own classroom kit to teach composting. Remember to take many pictures, as you will need these images to include in your task for the week.

5 basic senses – sense of smell, taste, hearing, vision, and touch

There are of course many more senses…

By blindfolding the learner, you deprive them of the sense of seeing and they must then use their other senses to try and figure out what the different substances are.

In this case, we work with soil, 3 of our 6 containers are filled with soil (sand, loam, clay).  The other 3 are filled with other interesting substances (jelly, salt, and coffee).

Aim/objective –

1. The students must try and identify the containers with soil and separate them from the other ones.
2. As enrichment and some more advanced higher order skills, we can expect our learners to also guestimate which containers hold the sand, loam, and clay.
3. Can they also identify what the other substances are?

Questions prior to the activity:

• What are our 5 basic senses?
• When you are blindfolded, which sense is taken away?
• What basic senses are we left with?
• What is the objective/goal of our activity?
• Because some of the substances are soil, is there another of our basic senses we should rather not use? Which one? And why?
• What will we be looking for when harnessing the power of our senses?
• How can we listen to the substances? What can we do…
• What characteristics will we be looking out for when listening to the substances?
• How can we feel the substances? What can we do…
• What characteristics will we be looking out for when feeling the substances?
• How can we smell the substances? What can we do…
• What characteristics will we be looking out for when smelling the substances?

Reflections:

• Make sure the containers are filled properly for the smell to be strong enough throughout;
• Start with listening, maybe close the container too if one could shake it about – should you shake the container wildly or gently?
• Then touch with finger tips;
• While touching, smell the substance;
• Have something for learners to wipe their hands;
• Ask questions throughout – guiding them;
• At first, do not create a competitive environment – the goal will be missed, and focus will be on winning, which in turn creates opportunity for shaming