The Magic School Bus ™

Planning and Announcing Your Party

• Pick a day and a time. Decide how long you want your party to last. We suggest an hour, or a little more.
• Reproduce the downloadable INVITATION below, and send them to your family and friends.
• Invite an expert - such as a teacher or health professional - to talk about the senses with your guests. Also, you could invite a musician to demonstrate an instrument or conduct a sing-along.

Invitations

Get Your Party Off to a Sensational Start!

• Since this Magic School Bus book is all about the senses, make sure your party area is stimulating to the eyes. Decorate with colorful balloons, streamers, and construction paper flowers. Be creative!
• Take some fashion tips from the Friz. Make your hair (or a friend’s) as frizzy as possible - or wear a frizzy red wig! Turn a plain, ordinary dress into an extraordinary Ms. Frizzle frock. Color the downloadable SENSE ORGAN DECORATIONS below and tape them to your clothing and shoes.
• When the guests arrive, pass out the downloadable NAME TAGS below. Have tape and markers handy.

Sense Organ Decorations
Name Tags

Brush Up on Your Science!

• It you don’t have any experts on hand, never fear. As long as you can take the time to read The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses, you’ll get all the facts you need to introduce the topic.
• Most of All, Remember: Enthusiasm, patience, and encouragement are what make the Friz so special.

Have a Contest: Guess How Many Jelly Beans!

Fill a large jar with jelly beans. Ask your guests to write their name and guess on a piece of paper. At the end of the party, announce who made the closest guess, and present him or her with a copy of The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses, the jar of jelly beans, or other special prize. You could even have first, second, and third prize winners.

Activities

Where would we be without our senses? If someone could not see, hear, feel, taste, or smell, that person would not be able to tell anything about the world.

SIGHT - See The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses pages 11-17.

Everyone is blind in one little spot of their eye. It's where all the nerves in the eye come together. They form a bundle called the optic nerve, which runs from the eye to the brain.

• Hand out the downloadable MAKE MS. FRIZZLE'S SHOE DISAPPEAR below for a fun way to find your blind spot.
• Discuss how we see colors, and pass out crayons and the downloadable COLORING SHEETS below.

Make Ms. Frizzle's Shoe Disappear
Coloring Sheet #1
Coloring Sheet #2

HEARING - See pages 20-27.

• Now is the time for a musical demonstration or sing-along.
• Play conductor. Have the guests start singing one note very softly, and gradually get louder and louder. Cut them off. Now, do the opposite: start very loud and get very, very soft.
• Play telephone. Sit in a circle, whisper a message into a person’s ear, then pass it along and see how it turns out in the end.

TASTE - See pages 34-37.

Our taste cells can detect only four tastes: bitter, sour, salty, and sweet. But people can taste over 10,000 flavors. This is because the flavors we taste are mixtures of the four basic tastes, combined with the many different smells from foods.

• It's snack time! Serve foods like cookies (sweet), lemon drops (sour), and potato chips (salty) to illustrate the different tastes. (Bitter isn’t a very nice taste - aspirin, for example - so you can skip that one!)
• Remember to serve juice to wash the treats down.

TOUCH - See pages 38-39.

• To demonstrate cold, warm, and soft, pass around an ice pack, a hot water bottle, and a stuffed animal.

SMELL - See pages 30-32.

• Get some scratch & sniff stickers, or have something with a strong smell (like pizza or fresh flowers), and smell them just by inhaling. Then sniff deeply. Is the smell stronger? That’s because the odor went up to the smell patches high up in your nostrils.

Have a SENSATIONAL Time !