Five Senses

Five pictures run down the left of this kindergarten page and five sense organs run down the right, each with a small coral dot on the inside edge. The sheet shown pairs lavender, the moon, a piano, a sponge and a bar of chocolate against a hand, an ear, a nose, a tongue and an eye. The child draws a line from each picture across to the part of the body they would use for it. The order of the two columns does not match, so every line crosses the middle of the page.

One picture per sense is the whole design, and it is what makes this the base page: there is no leftover, no near-miss and no card that could go two ways. The five items are chosen so that each one has a sense it belongs to before any other, a flower for smell and a piano for hearing, so a five-year-old meets the idea of a sense organ without having to weigh one against another.

One sheet, five lines. It is short, which suits a first lesson, and the picture column is generous enough to talk about before anyone picks up a pencil. This is the page the rest of the senses family builds on: the sorting, choosing and odd-one-out faces all reuse these same five organs, and by then some of the items really do belong to two senses at once.