With the Kids

Exploring Our 5 Senses: Hearing

Put your listening ears on! We’re calling on our keen sense of hearing to explore how noisy different foods are when chewed. We had lots of fun crunching a variety of foods and rating them from quietest to loudest. Turn your next snack time into a sensory science experiment!

Exploring the sense of hearing with noisy snacks

Exploring Our 5 Senses: Hearing

How Noisy is Your Snack?

Gather 5 or so snack items with varying degrees of crunchiness, such as:

  • apple slices
  • pear slices
  • grapes
  • carrot sticks
  • celery
  • graham cracker
  • nuts
  • cereal
  • crackers
  • croutons
  • pretzels
  • chips

Before you start snacking, take one piece of each food and predict the order from quietest to loudest, lining up the foods on your plate.

Then, sample each food and listen to how noisy each one is while you chew. My girls and I sampled the same food at the same time, so we could listen to how noisy each was when someone else was chewing it, too.

Chomping Noisy Snacks

Check your predictions! Were you right? Do you need to change the order? My girls had a debate over the quietest – marshmallow vs. pear. The pear ended up being a tiny bit noisier because it wasn’t super-ripe.

Noisy snack activity for sense of hearing

This was a fun way to add a little playful experimenting to our snack time, with no extra prep required. Have fun being a super-listener!

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