The sense of smell is the only one that sends signals to the brain, unfiltered.

Certain fragrances increase the brain’s ability to think. Mental alertness and creativity can be strengthened by smells like those of cinnamon, peppermint and lemon. Rose and lavender, on the other hand, help your child relax. Certain herbs and spices are also known to have calming effects, and can be used in appropriate situations. Use the sensory powers of these flowers and herbs to boost creativity and brainpower in your preschooler.

Encourage your child to participate in preschool activities that include the sense of smell , to stimulate these areas of her brain. It doesn’t have to be a formal activity with scented bottles – just introduce scents into everyday activities, and play around with them. Experiment!

• Give your child scented markers for artwork, or use scented dyes and paints.
• Create your own scented paint by mixing tempera paint with food essences.
• Create a fun and yummy scented paint mix of your own. Mix gelatin with just about half the amount of water that’s actually needed, and let your child paint with it. When the gelatin dries, she can have fun scratching at the painting, and sniffing the smell.
• Participate in activities together with your preschooler - make potpourri together. Put some cloves and cinnamon sticks inside a net bag, and draw it tight shut
• Make colorful new scented crayons out of old ones. Place crayons in muffin tins lined with paper, add a touch of food essence to each, and heat in the oven. You have colorful wax discs that smell heavenly. Here are specific instructions.
  
• Help her identify the smells of different food essences and extracts in your kitchen, and herbs and flowers from your garden.
• Encourage her to take an interest in your flower garden or herb garden.
• Fill your home with appropriate herbs that stimulate certain processes in the brain – keep rose, orange and chamomile in the bedroom to induce calmness and help her go to sleep. Lavender, vanilla and nutmeg are particularly good for those nasty irritable spells just before bed time. Place lemon, cinnamon, basil the room where she does most of her learning or art work.
  
• Participate in cooking activities together that make use of brainpower boosting extracts and essences - cinnamon buns, for instance.

Enjoy!

Continuing with my series on preschool sensory activities, we’re moving on to taste activities. Here’s the first one:

Take 8 dropper bottles. Smaller bottles with narrow mouths will also do.

Paint the lids of fours bottles green, and four others red.

Into each red lidded bottle, pour four different tasting liquids

• Sugary water for sweet
• Salt water for salty
• Lemon juice for sour
• Black coffee for bitter

Do the same for the green lidded bottles

Ask your child to wash her hand, open a red lidded bottle, put a couple of drops of liquid on the back of her hand.

Ask her to taste the liquid.

Let her then test each green lidded bottle till she finds the exact same taste.

When she finds a perfectly matched pair, let her keep those two bottles aside, and proceed with the others.

Keep a small jug of water and a plastic bowl for her to wash her hand after each testing session.

More Taste Sensory Activities

Add taste sensory activities to every day eating scenarios. Talk about the taste of different foods as you eat together.

• This apple is so sweet.
• This yoghurt is sour.
• These chips are salty.

Encourage her to find the taste of ingredients in each dish –

Can you taste the lemon in the lemon sponge cake?

Ask her what a certain food tastes like – a slice of lemon, a piece of horseradish etc.

Blindfold her and put a bite of a food that she’s familiar with in her mouth – a grape, a spoon of pasta. Let her guess what it is.

Place a large plastic tray in front of her, and give her three cups of pudding with food coloring mixed in each. Let her paint on the tray, and then lick the pudding off her fingers. Next time, vary the taste of the edible paint – make it thick yoghurt mixed with food coloring. This activity allows her to use all her senses – she can see the pudding, smell it, touch it and taste it.

Since kids haven’t been exposed to as many tastes as we have, they are not prepared for what they will taste, which heightens the entire sensory experience for them. Plus, the mouth is one of the earliest organs for exploration in a baby, which makes it feel natural for a preschooler when he takes part in a tasting activity. Introducing her to different tastes can also help her develop an interest in different foods.

Have fun!

Continuing with our series on sensory activities, here is an activity for sensory awareness of smell.  Sniffing and recognizing smells may be difficult for younger kids, but not if you introduce stronger and easily distinguishable fragrances.

Just like in the hearing activities, make two sets of jars, using a total of six jars, one set with red bottles and the other set in green bottles.  Plastic spice jars are fine, and so are baby food jars. 

Place a piece of cotton wool with a few drops of a particular liquid flavoring in each pair.  Use strong easily identifiable scents like lemon, vanilla, or herbs from your kitchen – lavender, rosemary.  If you want a stronger fragrance, use lemon rinds instead, or cinnamon, cloves or other strong spices.  If you’re not using cotton balls, you’ll have to make sure the bottles are opaque.

Ask your child to open and sniff a red jar, and then, open and sniff a green jar to find the matching green jar  with the exact same scent. 

This activity can be a lot of fun, especially when it comes to the strong scents!

 
Have fun, and keep smiling.

More sensory activities, and today, I wanted to focus on the sense of touch.

This is a simple activity that takes hardly any time for you to set up. Take a cloth or canvas bag (not a plastic or transparent one ), and fill with a variety of things that you can find around the house – toy cars, nuts, spoons, an apple, a stone or pebble from your yard, pine cones etc. Your child should be familiar with all the things in the bag, and should be able to name each without difficulty.

Ask your child to close her eyes, put her hand inside the bag, grab an object, and guess what it is.

As it gets easier for her to identify objects, increase the difficulty of the items – playing dice, coins etc. Increase the variety of tactile experiences for her – include satin and velvet ribbons, a feather, glass beads or small jars, small pom poms, a bell, a shoe brush.

Another activity is to have pairs of different fabrics – silk, velvet, cotton, plaid, corduroy and wool and mix them up in a basket. Ask your child to close her eyes, pick up a patch of fabric and find the other one that feels just like it. It’s not always easy, but once she gets more familiar with the difference in sensation when she touches silk and wool, she’ll be able to match more accurately. This is a great activity because she uses her sense of touch and her thinking powers to match fabrics.

Another touch activity - Sit in the yard or out in the open, and ask your child to close her eyes. Rub different objects one by one on her arm – a dry leaf, a stone, feather - and ask her to guess what they are.

Have fun!

Listening is a skill that in our world, is getting more and more difficult to pick up. Watching television and being transfixed by the sounds from it, or playing a video game doesn’t really require “listening.”

Play the silence game to encourage your preschooler to focus his attention on his hearing senses.

Use a kitchen timer to start the game. Don’t set a five minute timer; kids this age can’t be expected to sit still and silent for that long.

Start with 30 seconds – it’s just about right.

Ask your child to close her eyes, and keep quiet till the timer goes off.

When the timer goes off, ask her to tell her the sounds she heard when she was silent – the ceiling fan whirring, the neighbor’s dog, a door slamming shut.

Make a game out of it, and she’ll be eager to concentrate and focus all her listening powers.

This activity is great for improving concentration, and enhancing listening skills.

Learning that focuses only on seeing, and which does not include the other senses, is incomplete. Teach your child to use other less used senses to learn.

Try this activity that will help her use her sense of hearing.

Take 6 glass jars (baby food jars will do), and make them opaque by painting them on the inside.

Paint three jars red, and three green. Opaque plastic or wood jars will do just as well.

Divide the six jars into separate colored pairs, and fill each pair with items that make interesting sounds – beans, sand, rice, peas, and pebbles. For instance, one green and one red jar with peas, one green and one red jar with sand, and one green and one red jar with rice.

Place all jars before your child and ask her to pick a green jar, shake it and then find the red jar that makes the exact same sound. Once she’s found a pair, let her keep the jars aside.

Continue with the other jars.

As she gets used to identifying the sounds correctly, increase the difficulty of the activity by including other items in the jar – peas, unpopped corn etc.

This activity helps develop her fine sense of hearing, and boosts concentration abilities. 

Enjoy!