Friday, April 14, 2017

Sense of Smell

This week we read a book about the sense of smell.  We talked about how different things have different smells and we spent a lot of time smelling flowers.  A few weeks ago I was scouring online for some activities to do that involved the sense of smell and came across something called smell jars.  I loved that the activity isolated all the other aspects of each item except for it's smell but disliked the hefty price tags that I was finding of $100+.  I then started to look up do-it-yourself similar projects.  Again came to a road block because we had gotten rid of our old spice rack before moving here and didn't have identical glass jars all the same size.  Then a friend that is also moving this summer told me that she had a spice rack that they hadn't used for a long time and she was looking to get rid of it. Score!!  As they say - one man's trash is another man's treasure.

I took all the old spices out, washed the containers and took off all stickers so basically just had identical jars.

 I then took strips of construction paper and cut them so they filled the inside of the glass so the kids couldn't use any visual clues to tell the different items.  One set was blue and one set is red.


 I added cotton balls into the jar to hold the spices up closer to the top and this allows you to put certain liquids like lemon juice, vanilla extract etc in without it running all over the place.  You put a set of smells into each colour ie. garlic in a red jar and in a blue jar.



 I put stickers on the bottoms of the jars for each of the matching smells for me to be able to do quick checks if they are matched correctly.


 I put the shaker covers on so that nobody could use visual clues to tip them off.  The kids had fun working together sorting through all the different smells.





Super simple and now that I have it all set up I can just change up the smells in the containers quite easy.  It would be fun to change them to all spices, then all flowers etc when working on different subjects.

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