Sensory Art

This week at the international school the theme was “our five senses.” On Monday morning, the kids looked at some optical illusions online (with a real live optics scientist in the room!) and then did a smell test. The smell test was really funny: the head teacher had taken ordinary things (lemon, cinnamon, onion, peanuts, coffee, perfume, etc) and put them in unlabeled containers. The kids gave the funniest answers! One kid thought that everything he smelled was caramel candy (caramel candy was not item in the smell test). Also, the kids told the head teacher that her perfume smelled both like mosquito repellent and alcohol. Neither is far off, I guess, if one thinks about perfume’s uses or its constituent elements, but neither is what one wants to hear one’s perfume smells like, either.

Anyway, in art we used our sense of touch to create pictures with interesting texture. I brought in sandpaper, cotton balls, straws, toothpicks, tissue paper, plastic film, dried pasta, and yarn. I told the kids to make a picture of anything they wanted, but to use as many of the above elements as possible so that if they closed their eyes and ran their hands over their picture, it would feel really neat. The results were great!