Sense Organs: Write the Sense Word

Five sense organs stand one to a row on this 1st grade page — a tongue, an eye, an ear, a hand and a nose — and beside each one lies a wide band of three-line handwriting rules. A word bank across the top holds the five verbs: hear, touch, see, smell and taste. The child reads the bank, decides which verb the organ does, and copies it on to the lane. The bank order and the organ order are different, so the words cannot simply be taken from left to right.

This is the page that names the action rather than the organ, and it is the only face in the senses family that asks for handwriting. Keeping each verb on a full set of school rules means the letters are formed properly at the same time as the pairing is made, which is why the lanes are so much wider than the words need. The bank is closed and each verb is used exactly once, so a child who is sure of four can reason out the fifth.

One sheet, five organs, five words. It is a good page to leave with a child who finishes something else early, since it needs no explaining once the bank has been read aloud. Print it after the matching page, where the same five organs appeared without their verbs, and before the sentence-starter sheet, which asks the child to supply the content as well as the word.