I mentioned that we are exploring the Five Senses of Christmas in a previous post and today, I want to share with you a few of the ways we explored our sense of smell…

We started by reading the book titled “The Sweet Smells of Christmas” by Patricia M. Scarry…

On every other page of the book, there is a scratch and sniff dot that you can smell.  The kids LOVED getting a turn to smell each page and I have to say that this book was awesome to read for this experience.  Even I was surprised how authentic the smells were on each page…

After reading the book, then we took a minute to smell some spices I had brought with me to school that day…

Our Pre-K students also made their own peppermint smelly candy canes….

To make the candy canes, we started by drawing a candy cane with pencil on our paper. We actually practiced drawing this shape on chalkboards before hand.  By the way, you will notice that in just about every post I share that I do something with candy canes.  I just love candy canes.  I love the color, the smell, the taste, the shape, and all the things you can do with them! But any way back to drawing the shape….

And after a simple candy cane shape was drawn on the paper, the children used painter’s tape to add stripes across their candy cane line….

Then the children painted over the tape and the line.  They were given a choice of paint color and I added peppermint extract to whatever paint they chose so the paint smelled like peppermint…

We had pink and blue candy canes…

And red candy canes…

And green candy canes…

The paint smelled great while we were painting but after it dried, it didn’t smell so much. I think I should have added more extract but it was still fun during the process. After they finished painting, we removed the tape while the paint was still wet.  We just couldn’t wait to for it to dry:)  I had to help most of the children, but not everyone, remove some of their tape….

Sometimes the paper would tear just a little but we quickly learned that it was okay if the tape pulled off some of the paper because it was still white underneath.  We had to be extra careful though so we didn’t tear it too much…

And finally, to complete our sense of smell we played with peppermint play dough (by the way – the play dough was out the whole time it is just easier to write this post up in order but we didn’t necessarily play in this specific order)….

To make the peppermint play dough I used…

  • 2 cups of flour  (not flower:)
  • 1 cup of salt
  • 1 TBS of vegetable oil
  • 1 tsp. of Cream of Tar Tar
  • 2 cups of water
  • Red food color for the red play dough and no food color for the white play dough
  • And 5 or so drops or TBS of peppermint extract
I mixed the dry ingredients in a large sauce pan and then added the oil, water, extract and food coloring. Then I cooked on a medium heat and stirred constantly until the play dough looked like play dough. Then I took it out of the pan and kneaded it a bit.  The children used the play dough to make – yep you guessed it, candy canes!!
Well they also made other shapes too and by the end of the day, most of the play dough was all mixed up…
Those were the highlights of our “sense of smell” activities for our “Five Senses of Christmas” unit.  We actually explore all senses in some way everyday during this unit so you will see some criss-crossing back and forth on this as I share in future posts.
You can get the book we read from Amazon.com by clicking the photo below…