Teach your preschoolers about the sense of smell with these fun, play-based, minimal-prep activities.
There are ideas to help children explore different scents across several areas of the preschool curriculum, such as:
- Sensory exploration and science
- Art and creative activities
- Literacy and language
Here are 14 activities to add to your lesson plans, or to try at home with your preschooler.
Sensory Exploration & Science
Explore different scents and discover how the sense of smell works through hands-on activities.
1. Smell Bottles
Gather small plastic bottles and a selection of familiar scented items, such as spices, coffee, cocoa, dried fruit, herbs or citrus peel. For liquids such as lemon juice or flavour extracts, add a few drops to cotton balls and place them inside the bottles.
Have children smell each bottle and try to identify the scent. If they aren’t sure, encourage them to describe it or say what it reminds them of.
For a matching game, make two bottles of each scent, mix them up and challenge children to find the matching pairs using only their sense of smell.
2. Go on a Smell Walk
Take children on a walk around the garden, school grounds or neighbourhood and focus on the different smells they notice along the way.
Stop to smell safe items such as flowers, herbs, grass, leaves or damp soil. Encourage children to describe each scent and talk about which smells they like or dislike.
Small natural items can also be collected and added to a ‘smelling box’ for further exploration.
3. 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.
4. Favourite & Not-So-Favourite Smells
Offer children several safe items to smell, such as coffee, cinnamon, lemon, herbs or flowers. Ask them to decide which smells they like and which they don’t.
Make a simple class chart with Favourite Smells and Not-So-Favourite Smells and record the children’s choices. Discuss how people can have different opinions about the same smell.
You can also talk about smells that may warn us of danger, such as smoke, burning food or spoiled food, and how our sense of smell can help keep us safe.
5. Scented Sensory Play
Create a scented water sensory bin using natural materials such as lemon or orange slices, citrus peel, fresh herbs and cinnamon sticks.
Add cups, spoons and small containers for scooping, pouring and mixing. Encourage children to smell the different ingredients and notice how the scents combine as they play.
6. The Nose Knows
Share picture books and talk about how humans, animals and insects detect smells (tongues, trunks, antennae and even feet).
Offer picture cards showing different animals and challenge children to sort them according to how they detect smells.
Art & Creative Activities
Explore different scents while painting, creating and experimenting with art materials.
7. Fruit Tea Bag Painting
Offer an assortment of fruit-flavoured 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 colours spread across the paper.
The children can also move the scented tea bags around the paper to mix the colours or squeeze them for more colour.
8. Homemade Scratch & Sniff
Spread a thin layer of glue onto heavy paper or cardboard, then sprinkle different flavours of powdered gelatin over separate areas.
Once dry, children can scratch and sniff each area and try to guess the scents.
9. Scented Painting
Add safe food-based scents such as cinnamon, vanilla or cocoa to paint, or sprinkle spices onto wet paintings. Encourage children to notice how the smell changes the art experience.
10. Smelly Collage
Provide a variety of naturally scented materials, such as fresh or dried herbs, spices, coffee, dried citrus peel and flower petals.
Let children smell and explore the materials before choosing their favourites to glue onto paper or cardboard to create a scented collage.
Encourage them to describe and compare the different smells as they work.
11. Make a Nature Perfume
Set out naturally scented materials such as flower petals, herbs and citrus peel, along with small containers of water.
Let children choose and combine different materials to create their own pretend perfumes. Encourage them to smell their mixtures and describe the scents they have created.
Finally, have them invent a creative or funny name for their perfume.
Literacy & Language
Build vocabulary and language skills while talking, reading and writing about different smells.
12. Smell Vocabulary
Offer children a few familiar items to smell and challenge them to describe each scent without naming the item.
Encourage words such as sweet, spicy, smoky, earthy, flowery, fresh, strong and minty.
See if the other children can guess what they are smelling from the description.
13. Design a Class Book
After exploring a variety of scents, have each child choose their favourite and create a page for a class smell book.
They can draw something related to the scent or incorporate the smell into their page. Older preschoolers can add letters or words, while younger children can dictate their ideas to an adult.
Add each child’s name, then compile the pages into a class book to read, smell and enjoy together.
14. Smell Stories
Read a picture book about the sense of smell, such as Farley Follows His Nose by Lynn Johnston and Beth Cruickshank or The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf. You can also watch the read-aloud versions below.
Talk about the different smells mentioned in the stories. Have children describe them, share whether they have smelled them before and discuss what the scents remind them of.
I hope you’ll enjoy trying these ‘sense of sight’ activities. Explore more senses with these ideas:
- Sense of touch activities
- Sense of hearing activities
- Sense of sight activities
- Sense of taste activities
- Five senses activities
Looking for more theme ideas? Here’s a full list of preschool themes to help plan your activities.