Invite your students to explore Christmas with their nose!

“The Sweet Smell of Christmas” by Patricia M. Scarry is one of those books that I just love for many reasons. It is interactive, simple to read and understand, and it integrates the all important sense of smell (and taste) with the holiday season…

Inside the Book

This book also talks about real things that are easy to gather up during the holidays like candy canes, pine cones, oranges, gingerbread cookies, and hot chocolate! Throughout the book are illustrations of the different objects with stickers that the children can scratch and sniff…

What to Do

I gathered up most of the scratch and sniff items shared in the book (I didn’t add an apple because I forgot) and placed them into a container for the children to explore while we read our book…

Before reading the book, the children looked over the items in the basket and then we began reading. The children were invited to watch the book closely and each time they saw something in the book that was like something we had in our basket, they could take the object out of the basket and set it on their story board…

The children continued to watch each page of the book and look for the next new item they could smell and then take from the basket…

I am certain their favorite item to gather out of the basket was the candy cane. I let the children open their candy canes to smell and to taste as we finished reading the rest of the book…

A fun morning of conversation, story telling, and using our senses to discover the many sweet smells of Christmas…

Snack is Served!

Oh, and with the story and activity, snack was all ready to go too!

Available on Amazon