Sense of Smell

Today we learned about our sense of smell.  We discussed how we use our nose to smell, and that it send information to our brain to tell us if the smell is good or bad.  For our science experiment, we used our Smelly Jars!  Each jar (really old film canisters) were filled with cotton balls soaked in food extract to give them different scents.  We used a recording sheet to first guess what the smell was and draw our guess.  After we found out what the smell really was, the kindergarteners put a check mark next to it, or drew the real item in the next box.

We loved this center and had a great time using the Smelly Jars!  Here we are sniffing the different containers:

After making our guess, we found out that the smells were actually lemon, banana, vanilla and peppermint.  I loved hearing all of their guesses!  While almost everyone smelled bananas (I thought that was the hardest one!) and lemons, the guesses for vanilla and peppermint were the best.  The vanilla guesses were all sugary foods like ice cream, cupcakes, sprinkles and frosting!  The guesses for peppermint included gum, toothpaste, and my personal favorite - "that thing in the restaurant that my mom says I could choke on."  I'm assuming they meant the red and white hard candies.  :)

Here we are filling out our recording sheets with our research.

While many children guessed two or three correct, we only had two kindergarteners that correctly smelled all four Smelly Jars!  These two sure have a "nose" for science!