Taste
This cool citrus squeezer provoked many questions. Everyone was so curious as to just what this unusual new object in our classroom was. Instead of the children saying what they thought it was we talked about what a “question” is and encouraged the children to ask questions instead. We got some great questions. “Does it pump out water?", “Does it make holes in paper?”, “Can it move?”. By the time we started the activity the children knew what it did because someone asked their parent at pick up time. He shared this information with the class.
We tasted the juice right from the lemon. Wow! “That is sour!” We put some sugar in and some water and gave it a stir. Yum! This was so much better! We had a great time exploring this simple machine, and talking about “sour” and “sweet”.
We also realized that this activity used more than one sense. We could feel how smooth the lemon was, smell it when we cut it in half, and we could even hear the sound it made when the juice was falling into the jar.