These sense of smell activities will help you explore the senses with children in a fun, practical way.
Whether you are working on children’s sensory development or teaching the concept of senses through a preschool theme, these ideas are a great starting point.
1. Smell Bottles
Gather small plastic bottles, cotton balls and items for smelling. These items could include familiar spices, coffee (ground or beans), cocoa, and dried fruits.
Liquid items, such as lemon juice, vinegar, essential oils, flavour extracts, and perfume, can be dropped onto cotton balls and placed inside the bottles.
Children sniff the bottles and name the smells. If they are unsure what an item is, they could state what it reminds them of (cinnamon=apple pie).
You could offer pictures of the items for children to match up with the smells in the bottles or make two bottles of each smell for matching.
2. Good Smells & Bad Smells
Draw a simple chart with the two halves labelled “Good Smells” and “Bad Smells.”
Share a book with children about smells, such as Farley Follows His Nose (Lynn Johnston & Beth Cruickshank) or Ferdinand the Bull (Munro Leaf). Watch them below.
For each smell mentioned in the book, challenge the children to decide if it belongs in the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ column. Sometimes they might disagree because of personal preferences.
Depending on the books shared and your goals, you could also add a “Dangerous Smells” category for things like gasoline and smoke.
3. Go on a Smell Walk
While walking around the neighbourhood or in a garden, focus on how different things smell.
Small items could be collected and added to a “smelling box.” The children can draw pictures of larger items.
Discuss pleasant fragrances and unpleasant odours, why things in nature smell as they do, and what animals can discover by sniffing.
4. Smell & Taste Connection
Before serving snacks or a meal, challenge kids to close their eyes and use their sense of smell to guess what you are serving them.
Next, ask them to taste the food with their noses pinched closed to show the close connection between smell and taste.
Remind them about when they have a stuffy nose and have trouble tasting their food. Explain that the flavours we detect while eating are a combination of smell and taste.
5. Sense of Smell Arts & Crafts
Offer smelly materials for children to use in their arts & crafts projects. Some options include scented markers/dotters, smelly playdough/slime, scented paint and crushed fruit cereal with glue.
can attach coloured cupcake paper ‘flowers’ to construction paper, with each centre made of a cotton ball scented with essential oil or perfume. Stems and leaves can be drawn on with scented markers.
6. Homemade Scratch & Sniff
Purchase various flavours (scents) of powdered gelatin.
Children spread glue thinly on heavy paper or cardboard and then sprinkle one type of gelatin at a time onto the glue.
They can scratch and sniff the different areas, guessing the scents.
7. Smelly Collage
Assemble many types of items with smells: leaves from herbs, flowers, dried spices, coffee and flavoured dry gelatin.
Add cotton balls or fabric swatches with essential oils or flavour extracts.
8. Fruit Tea Bag Painting
Offer an assortment of fruit herbal tea bags. Children can sniff them and guess the various fruits.
Then, using heavy paper for the background, the kids each choose several tea bags and arrange them on the paper. Using spray bottles filled with water, they squirt a little at a time on each bag, watching the coloured water escaping around the bags.
The children can also move the scented tea bags around the paper to mix the colours or squeeze them for more colour.
9. Name that Perfume
Show kids and talk about the names of some common perfumes or colognes. Set up a sensory station with various liquid-scented items, such as those used in activity #1, to design their own “perfumes.”
Challenge the children to think of suitable or funny names for their perfumes.
10. The Nose Knows
Share picture books and talk about the noses of humans, along with how various animals and insects detect smells (tongues, trunks, antennas and even feet).
Offer cards with pictures of different examples for the children to sort into nose-type categories.
11. Experience the Scent
Offer scented shaving cream for children to manipulate with their hands, which releases even more of the smell.
Add scented flavour extracts or essential oils to your water table for kids to enjoy while dipping and pouring with various plastic containers.
Here are some more fun shaving cream activities.
12. Cinnamon Finger Painting
Children can create finger paintings.
Once the pictures are dry, add a thin coating of glue. Then sprinkle ground cinnamon over the glue to let dry for scratch and sniff artwork.
13. Release the Scent
Offer children squares of sandpaper and large cinnamon sticks. They can draw on the sandpaper with the cinnamon to release its scent.
14. Design a Class/Family Book
After exploring many scents and books about smells, children choose their favourite scents.
Each child designs a page for the book based on the smell they chose, either drawing something related to it or incorporating the scent into their page.
Older preschoolers could also add letters or words they want on their pages, and the younger children could dictate their words to an adult.
All pages should feature the kids’ names. Compile the pages for the book, to be read, smelled and enjoyed by all!
15. Smell Vocabulary
As part of all smelling activities, model and incorporate vocabulary for kids to use when discussing various scents.
Ideas to include: sweet, stinky, yummy, sour, rotten, sweaty, spicy, icky, smoky, minty, earthy and flowery.
Because all the senses are closely related, feel free to address more than one sense at a time even if the sense of smell is your main focus. The ‘nose knows no limit,’ so use these activities as a springboard for your own ideas!
Here are more activities to help you teach the rest of the senses, including:
- Taste
- Hearing
- Sight
- Touch
- Body awareness (proprioception)
- Balance (vestibular)
