Paws Point 2Exploring The Sense Of TasteInspector Paws Science Enquiry Resource

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Contents

Teacher’s Notes 2

• Teacher’s Summary 2

• Classroom Activities Summary 2

• Support Materials Summary 3

Classroom Activities 3

• Science Enquiry 1: Tongue Talk 3

• Science Enquiry 2: Check Out Your Tongue! 3 • Science Enquiry 3: Take The Taste Test! 4

• Science Enquiry 4: A Nose For Taste 5

• Science Enquiry 5: What Do Dogs Eat? 6 Support Materials 7

• Open Wide Factsheet (Pupil/ Teacher Sheet) 7

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Paws Point 2Exploring The Sense Of Taste

1Paws Point 2 - Exploring The Sense Of Taste

Teacher’s Notes

Teacher’s Summary

Ideal for lower Key Stage 2 (ages 7 to 9) this section provides a fun packed look at the mechanics of taste, using scientific enquiry and practical investigations to support pupils’ exploration of nose design, scent sensitivity and tracking.

Open Wide! Use the science enquiry experiments in this section to test taste buds or check out the funky facts about the tongue and compare how our sense of taste differs to that of a dog!

Classroom Activities Summary

Science Enquiry 1: Tongue Talk (no preparation required)Simple activity to heighten pupils’ awareness of the positioning of their tongue in their mouth, and how this changes according to the sound(s) that they are trying to make.

Science Enquiry 2: Check Out Your Tongue! (no preparation required) Simple observational enquiry that prompts pupils to consider the design and flexibility of this fascinating organ made up mainly of muscle.

Science Enquiry 3: Take The Taste Test! (pre-session preparation required)Pupils taste and classify the four flavours recognised by their taste buds, drawing a map of each area of their tongue’s sensitivity. Pupils could consider and discuss how we are able to taste and enjoy such a variety of flavours, when our tongue only makes such basic distinctions.

Science Enquiry 4: A Nose For Taste (pre-session preparation required)Pupils taste and classify a number of given, but unseen food items, prompting pupils to question how they identified each flavour and provides a number of variants for testing their theories about the link between taste and smell. Developing pupils’ perceptions of the link between our sense of smell and taste makes this activity a perfect complement to the Scent Detectives activity in Paws Point 1.

Science Enquiry 5: What Do Dogs Eat? (no preparation required)Role play activity to support pupils’ understanding of feeding their dogs correctly and avoiding the dangers of discarded food waste.

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2Paws Point 2 - Exploring The Sense Of Taste

Support Materials Summary

Open Wide Factsheet Fun, fact filled statements to support pupil discussion and comparison of their sense of taste with that of a dog.

Classroom Activities

Science Enquiry 1: Tongue Talk

You use the muscles in the back of your tongue to help you make certain sounds, like the letters “k” and hard “g” (like in the word “go”). Say the sounds of each letter of the alphabet slowly, feeling where your tongue is and how it moves to help you create each different sound.Dogs can’t make as many sounds as we can but they too use their tongues to communicate by growling, barking, howling, whining and yelping.

Science Enquiry 2: Check Out Your Tongue!

You will need: a mirror, a magnifying glass, a piece of paper, a pencil and a partner.

1. Take a look in the mirror and stick out your tongue. You will see that it is quite thick and chunky towards the back of your mouth and thinner and more flexible at the tip. If you lift your tongue up you will see that it is attached to the base of your mouth with a thin layer of tissue or membrane called your fraenulum.

2. Now take turns to sketch your partner’s tongue, be sure to fill the paper with your drawing to allow plenty of space to add detail and labels.

3. Now you’ve drawn your tongues let’s see what they can do! Wiggle them around to see just how flexible they are. See how far you can stick out your tongue. Some people can lick the end of their nose with their tongue. Can you? Can you roll you tongue width ways? Length ways? Compare what you can do with your tongue with what your partner can do with theirs. Make a note of all the different things you tried and compare as a class.

4. Now look at the top of your tongue again, but this time position the magnifying glass so that you can see the surface of your tongue in more detail. Notice how it’s rough and bumpy - not like the underside, which is very smooth. That is because the top of your tongue has hundreds of tiny papillae, which help you grip food and move it around while you chew, as well as containing your taste buds. Humans have about 9000 taste buds, which between them can detect sweet, sour, bitter, and salty flavours. Each taste bud is made up of taste cells, which have sensitive, microscopic hairs called microvillus. These tiny hairs send messages to the brain, which interprets the signals and identifies the taste for you.

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Science Enquiry 3: Take the Taste Test!

You will need: the sketch of your tongue, four different coloured pens or pencils, cotton buds, some ice cubes and a number of items to taste e.g. sugar dissolved in a small amount of water, vinegar, salt dissolved in a small amount of water and some unsweetened grapefruit juice.

Health and Safety: Do not use the same cotton bud as anyone else, use a different cotton bud for each test and rinse mouth between tasting.

1. Use the buds to dab the liquids on different parts of your tongue.

2. Mark where each taste tastes strongest, using a different colour to mark sweet, sour, bitter, and salty flavours on your tongue sketch.

3. Systematically test all four tastes to find out where on the tongue you taste sour, sweet, salty, and bitter, in that order.

4. Compare your findings with the class. Did they all have the same results?

5. If time allows repeat the experiment having sucked on an ice cube. Were your results the same?

6. Compare and discuss your findings.

Hopefully, your taste test revealed that different parts of the tongue have taste buds that perform different jobs. We can only taste the four different flavours you sampled i.e. sour, salty, bitter and sweet. Most people taste sweet tastes at the front of the tongue, sour tastes often make the sides of your mouth begin to water because the sides of the tongue taste sour tastes like lemons or vinegar. The taste buds at the back of the tongue taste bitter tastes like grapefruit but the taste buds for salty tastes are all over the tongue, so we can taste salt on every part of the tongue.

Some things can make your taste bud receptors less sensitive, like cold foods or drinks. An ice pop made from your favourite juice won’t taste as sweet as plain juice. If you suck on an ice cube before you eat a food you don’t like, it may not taste so bad!

Being able to smell something we are eating is also an important part of tasting it. When you have a cold and your nose is blocked, can you smell your food? Does your food have a good taste, or does it all taste the same?

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Science Enquiry 4: A Nose For Taste

You will need: slices of onion, small pieces of granny smith apple, conference pear and potato, tissues for removal of pieces if pupils prefer not to swallow.

1. Taste a tiny piece of pear, apple and potato and note your response.

2. Now close your eyes and hold your nose and repeat the test.

3. If you don’t smell the food, can you tell the difference between the taste of pear, apple and potato?

4. Now try tasting the apple or pear whilst holding a slice of raw onion under your nose.

5. Was your sense of taste confused by your sense of smell?

6. Compare and discuss your findings.

Identifying tastes is your brain’s way of telling you about what is going on in your mouth, and in some cases, keeping you safe. Have you ever taken a drink of milk that tasted funny? When the milk hits the taste buds, they send nerve impulses to your brain: “Milk coming in - and it tastes funny!” Once your brain unscrambled the nerve impulses, it recognised the taste as a dangerous one, and you knew not to drink the milk.

Reports from our noses and mouths alert us to pleasure, danger, food and drink in the environment. The complicated processes of smelling and tasting begin when molecules detach from substances and float into noses or are put into mouths.

In both cases, the molecules must dissolve in the watery mucus, called saliva, in order to bind to and stimulate special cells. The saliva mixes with the food and spreads the flavours all over the tongue. The different taste buds begin their jobs and you can tell if what you are eating is sweet, sour, salty, bitter or any combination. Your taste cells transmit messages to brain centres where we perceive odours or tastes, and where we remember people, places, or events associated with these olfactory (smell) and gustatory (taste) sensations. Your tongue also gets help from your teeth, lips, and mouth. Your teeth help your tongue grind food as the tongue mixes the food around your mouth. And without your teeth, lips, and the roof of your mouth, your tongue wouldn’t be able to form sounds to make words. Saliva is also a friend of the tongue. A dry tongue can’t taste a thing, so saliva helps the tongue by keeping it wet. Saliva moistens food and helps to break it down, which makes it easier for the tongue to push the food back to swallow it.

Even when you are sleeping, your tongue is busy pushing saliva into the throat to be swallowed. It’s a good thing, too, or we’d be drooling all over our pillows. Keep your tongue in tip-top shape by brushing it along with your teeth and avoiding super-hot foods. A burnt tongue is no fun!

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Science Enquiry 5: What Do Dogs Eat?

Using the role play scenarios below, pupils consider and discuss the response of a responsible dog owner in their groups or they can consider their own actions as responsible citizens (e.g. don’t drop litter, consider the needs of animals and others).

1. An afternoon strollWhilst walking their dog an owner uses a short cut near a local primary school. There is a lot of food packaging and empty sweet wrappers littering the ground. Unaware of the risks, the owner allows the dog to investigate all the exciting smells. The dog smells out a half eaten sandwich and eats it quickly before his owner can stop him. Unfortunately the sandwich is still half wrapped in cling film and the dog begins to choke on it.

Response points:• What should the owner have done when they saw the litter?• What other risks might there be to the dog? • What should the owner do now?• How can the owner ensure that this does not happen again?

Challenge! Can you re-enact the role play as a responsible dog owner and avoid the unpleasant consequences?

2. At the vetsA dog owner takes his pet to the vet for a health check. The dog is very overweight and the vet is concerned about the strain on the dog’s vital organs and joints caused by his poor diet and lack of exercise.

The vet checks the dog’s teeth and coat. The owner has not been cleaning his dog’s teeth and the dog has clearly been eating too many sweets and treats. The vet advises the owner to clean his dog’s teeth regularly and shows how to do it.

The vet also explains that lots of human foods can be poisonous to dogs, especially chocolate and grapes. The dog should have at least two walks each day and be fed a commercially produced balanced dog food twice a day. The owner will need to cut down on treats, especially cakes and biscuits designed for humans! The vet asks the owner to return in three weeks so that he can check the dog’s weight again.

Response points:• Why was the vet concerned about the condition of the dog?• Why is it important for dogs to eat a doggy diet?• How could you check that you are feeding your dog correctly?• What might have happened had the owner not booked a routine health check for the dog?

Challenge! Can you create a role play scenario for the owners return visit in three weeks?

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Open Wide Factsheet

• We use our tongues to help us taste, chew, swallow, and talk.

• Your tongue is mainly made up of lots of groups of muscles. These muscles run in different directions to carry out all the tongue’s jobs.

• The front part of the tongue is very flexible and can move around a lot, working with the teeth to create different types of words.

• The flexible part of your tongue also helps you eat by helping to move food around your mouth while you chew.

• Your sense of taste and smell are connected, which is why all your food tastes the same when you have a blocked nose!

• Your tongue pushes the food to your back teeth so the teeth can grind it up, before it’s pushed to the back of the mouth and down your throat or oesophagus, which is the food pipe that leads from your throat to your stomach.

• Human tongues vary in length, flexibility and sensitivity to taste. Have a go at some of our tongue tingling experiments to see how your tongue measures up!

• A dog’s tongue works in exactly the same way as a human’s, but is much less muscular - as the dog has a few additional uses for his tongue such as washing himself or panting to cool down.

• Dogs’ tongues can detect sweet, sour, bitter and salty tastes just the same way we do.

• Dogs have far fewer taste buds than we do, approximately one for every six. Although their limited number of taste buds register sweet, sour, bitter, and salty tastes, it is probably more realistic to think of the dog’s response to taste as pleasant, indifferent, or unpleasant.

• Unlike ours, a dog’s taste buds are located mainly towards the back portion of the tongue because the tip of a dog’s tongue spends a lot of its time exposed to the air and is also used for cleaning your dog’s coat.

• Dogs’ saliva is also said to have antiseptic qualities, which is why if a dog hurts itself he will often sit and lick the wound.

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• Although typically there are probably fewer than 2,000 taste buds on a dog’s tongue their sense of taste works with the dog’s more sensitive sense of smell. Smell initially attracts a dog to food then taste and texture receptors take over.

• Food is usually bolted down very quickly by dogs with hardly any chewing or time to taste it. Thus taste is not as important to dogs as it is to us humans. Dogs tend to judge whether something is good to eat by the way it smells, so the smellier the food the better they like it!

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