AskERIC Lesson Plans
Lesson Plan #:AELP-SPS0009


The Touch n Feel Box

An AskERIC Lesson Plan


Submitted by:Charles Gutierrez
School or Affiliation:Sierra Vista Elementary Las Vegas, NM
Endorsed by: These lesson plans are the result of the work of the teachers who have attended the Columbia Education Center's Summer Workshop. CEC is a consortium of teacher from 14 western states dedicated to improving the quality of education in the rural, western, United States, and particularly the quality of math and science Education. CEC uses Big Sky Telegraph as the hub of their telecommunications network that allows the participating teachers to stay in contact with their trainers and peers that they have met at the Workshops.

Date: May 1994 


Overview:

This lesson is used as an introduction to the study of living and non-living things through the use of tactile perception or the sense of touch.

Grade Level:

I have used this lesson with second, third,and fourth grade level students. As the grade level increases the objects must have surfaces unfamiliar to the students to keep them interested or guessing.

Objective:

The object of the lesson is for students to identify one or more living and non-living things through the use of tactile perception, better known as the sense of touch.

Resources/Materials:

  1. round ice cream container, hat box, or even shoe box.
  2. different textured rocks.
  3. various fruits or vegetables.
  4. nuts such as pine cones, acorns, pinon nuts, etc.
  5. leaves found in the school yard.
  6. seeds found on the pant legs of the students.
The list could go on and on by using your imagination.

Activities and Procedures:

In the classroom, have students put their hand in the hatbox and attempt to describe to the other students what it is that he or she is feeling. This is a great place for the use of adjectives and to tie it to your language component. Also a great place to use words like fuzzy, smooth, jagged,etc.

You might also ask your older students to go out into the school yard and find a leaf or a rock or a seed that matches what he or she felt and bring it in to compare to the one in the box.

This leads to classifying and more use of words like rough, hairy, smooth,etc.

An extension of this lesson would be for the students to each make their own touch n feel box. Encourage them to come up with difficult things to identify. Have students make a list of describing words used to identify the object in the box.

Caution must be used as to the objects used in the box. Nothing that could be dangerous to fellow students is to be used. This is a great place to introduce awareness for the environment. Also never allow any student to put a live animal in a box.

Tying it all Together:

This is a very good experience for the second grader who has not done very much classification but can also be used with fourth and fifth graders with a little bit of ingenuity and a variety of sets of objects suitable for the different grade levels.

This activity has been copied, with permission, from the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) server to ours, to allow faster access from our website. We encourage you to explore the original site.

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