Parashat Toldot and the 5 senses

In  Parshat Toldot twins boys are born to Rivkah and Yitzchak. My husband is a twin, so we just pulled out some photo albums and we were good to go with that concept.

This week's parasha also tells the story of Yitzchak blessing his sons before his death.

  Yitzchak is growing old and blind and tells his son Eisav to hunt some food for him and when he returns he will bless him. Rivkah overhears and tells Yaakov to impersonate as Eisav in order to receive his brother's blessings. She dresses him in Eisav's clothes, covers his skin with goatskin, and prepares food to give to Yitzchak. Since Yitchak's vision was poor, he had to use all of his other senses to determine who was the man standing before him. 

We spent some time role playing how Yitzchak used his senses and then expanded our lesson to other activities that teach about our five senses. 

See chart below:

Senses	Yitchak’s use of senses to discern who stood in front of him to receive his blessing	Parasha reenactment	5 senses expanded lesson
Sight	Poor Vision	Blindfold child to have them use their other senses to figure out who or what is in front of them.	Place a few object for child to see, tell child to close their eyes while you remove one of the objects. Have them guess what went missing. Great visual memory task!
Hearing	Listening to speaker’s voice	While blindfolded listen to other’s speak and guess who is talking to you	Have child turn their back to you while you play a variety of real/toy instruments. Child guesses the instrument.
Taste	Tasting the food brought to him	While blindfolded try to guess what you are eating.	While blindfolded child tastes a variety of foods and describes them as sweet, salty, sour, etc
Touch	Feeling the skin of person in front of him	While blindfolded, have child say feel the skin of your arm vs. an arm covered with a wooly sweater	Place different shaped items in socks and have child feel outline of object with their fingers to describe the shape they feel. We drew the shapes as well before opening the sock.
Smell	Smelling the person while giving him a kiss	While blindfolded, have you child give a kiss to you or siblings and guess who they smell. We did this one with my mother and it was a lot of fun for all!	Put different scented materials into containers with holes on top. Children can guess the smell or have two of the same scent for children to match.