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Taste


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On our investigation table we have been exploring the senses and after half term we are doing taste.

Apart from tasting different foods and describing and sorting foods by how they taste does anyone have any other ideas for 4-5 year olds.

Thanks

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We did tasting whilst blinfolded, then sighted testing (blue coloured mashed potato) to see what difference the combo of sight and taste had, and similarly, we tasted banana whilst we had onion under our nose, to see interaction of taste and smell, and tasted with noses pinced in similar experiment. Interesting results!!!!

 

We also tasted whole v's semi v's skimmed milk in unmarked cups, and again got quite suprising results.

 

Could also do areas of tongue most receptive to sweet and sour.

 

Always a fun topic.

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Trying to identify different flavours of crisps. You would have to be careful to watch the first child doesn't eat them all but it really engages the children. I put cups out with one or two of each flavour in numbered cups then they have to put a disc showing that number in the crisp bag they think it is from.

 

They are unsurprisingly able to identify the flavours from the bag design at a very early age!

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I only eat blue crisps too! Love the crisps idea.

 

We went to a show at the science centre in Bristol yesterday where they talked about taste. This whole thing with different areas of your tongue is apparently a myth, it came about because of a mistranslation of some German experiments done in the 19th century. These days they believe you can taste flavours anywhere on your tongue.

 

Apart from sweet, sour, bitter and salty, there's a new taste called umami apparently, which is the meaty flavour of things like MSG.

 

Another interesting thing they talked about was sensory specific satiety. This is where you eat lots of your dinner and feel full and don't want any more of it, but then you see pudding and you somehow find space! They demonstrated this by asking a kid to line up foods (chocolate, jaffa cakes, etc.) in order of her favourite, but once she had eaten a couple of pieces of chocolate, she changed the order in which she wanted them lined up as her favourites.

 

Not sure if any of that helps but I found it fascinating!

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Another interesting thing they talked about was sensory specific satiety. This is where you eat lots of your dinner and feel full and don't want any more of it, but then you see pudding and you somehow find space! They demonstrated this by asking a kid to line up foods (chocolate, jaffa cakes, etc.) in order of her favourite, but once she had eaten a couple of pieces of chocolate, she changed the order in which she wanted them lined up as her favourites.

 

Not sure if any of that helps but I found it fascinating!

 

That explains why if I eat chocolate before I go shopping I buy healthier food!

 

Quite a hard concept to introduce to children but could be very useful for adults to know about.

 

Does this mean that if they want to eat their pudding first we should let them?

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We have also done the crisps thing - very popular.

 

We also went to the supermarket and bought loads of unusual fruit - many of which the staff had never tried either - and had a tasting session which was great fun!

 

We chopped up lots of vegetables and made a soup and then tried to see what flavours we could still taste! (hmm, not many actually after it had been boiled for a bit - over two days! yummy though!)

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