Investigate a flower's power of marketing by making an imitation flower that successfully signals a bee (or other pollinator of your choice) to visit. Try to determine what characteristics will attract a pollinator to your flower. Also available as an online game.

This activity (on page 3 of the PDF) is a full inquiry investigation into animal behavior. Learners will create five or six scent blocks by rubbing wood blocks with different kitchen spices, foods, or animal scents. Then, learners let their pets investigate each block separately. Carefully observed behaviors are recorded for interpretation. Relates to linked video, DragonflyTV GPS: Animal Scent.

In this activity, learners use their imaginations and experiment with different materials to create bug hats. Use the suggested open-ended questions to encourage learners to talk about what they know about bugs as well as to compare humans and insects. Learners will also discover that insects use antennae to touch, taste, and smell!

Few people are aware of how crucial the sense of smell is to identifying foods, or the adaptive value of being able to identify a food as being familiar and therefore safe to eat. In this lesson and activity, students conduct an experiment to determine whether or not the sense of smell is important to being able to recognize foods by taste. The teacher leads a discussion that allows students to explore why it might be adaptive for humans and other animals to be able to identify nutritious versus noxious foods. This is followed by a demonstration in which a volunteer tastes and identifies a familiar food, and then attempts to taste and identify a different familiar food while holding his or her nose and closing his or her eyes. Then, the class develops a hypothesis and a means to obtain quantitative results for an experiment to determine whether students can identify foods when the sense of smell has been eliminated.

In this activity, learners use household materials to investigate and explore their ability to smell an odor. Learners compare and contrast results to determine if some individuals have a better sense of smell than others. Learners also observe the Maillard reaction and how different odor molecules are released into the air. Note: Since experiment #2 requires the use of a hot stove and skillet, we recommend that an adult conducts it as a demonstration, or that the appropriate safety materials are used and safety guidelines are discussed prior to the experiment.

In this activity, learners use their senses to collect information about a fruit and record their findings in a Science Journal. Learners use science words to describe the fruit, ask or write questions about the fruit, and make drawings and take measurements of the fruit. At the end, the fruits are mixed together and learners must be able to find their own fruit in a pile of other similar fruits. This activity is written as an assessment but can be used individually. A scoring rubric is included. This activity is featured on pp.15-16 of the "ScienceWorks" K-2 unit of study.

Young learners investigate and observe the properties of three liquids -- water, vegetable oil, and corn syrup. They use their senses to collect data and ask and answer questions. This lesson for young learners introduces the scientific process.

Do shark feeding frenzies really exist? Will sharks turn into a bunch of cannibals if they start competing for food? In this video, Jonathan wants to find out, and travels to Micronesia for an experiment. You won‰ŰŞt believe the fantastic result! Please see the accompanying study guide for educational objectives and discussion points.

Learners make kimchee or sauerkraut, which is really just fermented cabbage, in a 2-liter plastic bottle. The fermentation process takes from 3 days to 2 weeks to complete, and learners measure the progress by taking a daily pH (acid level) test. This activity can be used to teach about anaerobic bacteria, acidity, osmosis, concentration, and density. It comes from a printed book that is also available in Spanish, though the Spanish version is not available online.

In this outdoor fall activity, learners find out what living in or under a layer of leaves is like. Learners will discover that animals that live in leaf litter use different senses to find prey, avoid predators, and to navigate through the litter. Learners role play predator and preyäóîthe "prey" hides in a large pile of leaves, and the "predator" tries to "strike" by reaching straight into the leaf pile to grab the "prey." Learners also consider what body adaptations help organisms that spend part of their life under the leaves.

Of all the animals in the oceans, the hammerhead shark may be one of the strangest looking. The exact purpose of the wide, flat head is a mystery, but several theories abound. In this video, we travel to the shark-infested waters of the Galapagos in Ecuador and to a research station in Hawaii to learn about the unusual habits of these sinister-looking sharks. Jonathan swims in schools of hundreds of hammerheads, and yet the sharks ignore him. What are the sharks up to? Please see the accompanying study guide for educational objectives and discussion points.

This lesson describes the function and components of the human nervous system. It helps students understand the purpose of our brain, spinal cord, nerves and the five senses. How the nervous system is affected during spaceflight is also discussed in this lesson.

In this activity on page 9 of the PDF, learners test how flavoring extracts move through the walls of a balloon. Learners discover that the extracts' motion is similar to the way that oxygen and nutrients move through the walls of your capillaries. Learners discover that the walls of capillaries have holes that are too small to see.

Learners smell balloons filled with different scents to guess what's inside. From this, they infer the presence and motion of scented molecules. This is a good introduction to atoms and molecules, as well as an opportunity to talk about diffusion, states of matter, chemoreceptors and the sense of smell. For latex-sensitive learners, this activity also works with non-latex gloves. Extensions include measuring diffusion rates, and extracting essential oils from plant parts. Educator-led demonstrations include having learners act as molecules in a model of a solid, liquid, and gas, and then diffusing through a model membrane as a gas. Part of the "No Hassle Messy Science with a Wow" activity guide by OMSI, where all activities use only household materials.

In this outdoor, nighttime activity, learners gather around a brightly lit, white surface and study the behavior of nocturnal animals attracted to the light, particularly night fliers. Learners consider such questions as why attraction to light benefits certain animals, whether adding color to the light sources affects the animals' behavior, and how light could be used for pest control.

In this outdoor activity/field trip, learners investigate organisms that live along the ocean's rocky coast. Learners add bare rocks to an intertidal zone, and over the course of 6-8 weeks observe what plant and animals colonize (come to live) on the new rocks. The intertidal zone, covered by water during high tides and uncovered at low tides, is usually densely covered with marine organisms such as seaweeds, mussels, barnacles, snails, limpets, anemones and sea stars. Learners may not only discover pioneer organisms (first colonizers) of their new rocks, but other organisms that replace the first arrivals in the process of succession. This activity calls for multiple, weekly return visits to the intertidal zone.

In this matchmaking activity (on page 2 of the PDF), learners will each have a scented cotton ball taped to their shoulder. The scent (e.g. peppermint oil or almond extract) will be kept secret by an adult while the participants walk around silently, sniffing each other's cotton balls in search of anyone sharing the same scent. Relates to the linked video, DragonflyTV GPS: Animal Scent.

This is an activity about our sense of smell and how it compares to sharks' super noses. Learners will create varying solutions of water and perfume. Can you smell a single drop of perfume in 500 ml of water? Sharks certainly can! The experiment uses only a few simple materials, and is a great way to begin talking about human and animal perception.

In this two-part activity, learners use household items to smell the difference between some stereoisomers, or molecules which are mirror images of one another. First, learners compare the scents of orange peel and lemon peel, which both contain two versions of limonene (a stereoisomer). Then, learners compare the scents of crushed caraway seeds and crushed mint leaves, which each contain a version of carvone (another stereoisomer). Use this activity to help learners discover how a molecule's shape affects smell.

In this activity, learners cook amino acids and sugar to explore the range of aromas released. When amino acids and sugars are heated, learners will observe a phenomenon known as the Maillard reaction, also known as the browning reaction. Caution!: Kids, please don't try this at home without the help of an adult. The corn syrup can get very hot, very quickly.