I was on Pinterest recently and saw a post about doing a family fun night activity involving taste testing different flavors of Oreos. There are so many different ones now, and this particular activity, from Joy in the Works, involved buying different flavors and doing a blind tasting where people tried to guess which flavor they were sampling.
But it occurred to me that this could actually be an educational activity as well.
Whether you are tasting cookies, different colors of watermelon (that one is from Go Science Girls) or different varieties of apples (1 Plus 1 Plus 1 Equals 1), tasting foods and describing the taste is a great way to learn about our sense of taste, the words we use to describe taste, and to expand vocabulary and description of tastes.
Ask children to come up with different words to describe what they are tasting: crunchy, chewy, soft, tangy, sweet and so on. And remember that smell and sight are important in how we perceive taste, so describing those things is great, too.
Do you ever use taste tests as a way to learn? I’d love to hear about it!
[Photo via Go Science Girls.]
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