Smelling Good

So I can’t take credit for today’s activity.  My kids are hooked on a tv show called Sid the Science Kid and after each episode they insist that we repeat the experiment ourselves.  I thought I’d share this one because the kids have been talking about it non-stop all week.

Sid was teaching the kids about smell and how the molecules travel through the air and into our noses and that’s how we smell things.  The nice thing about following Sid is that the kids have already learned the basics, so we can just have fun with it.  Today we’re doing a smell test to see if the molecules from different foods can travel up to our noses and tell us what the food is without seeing it.

I had mini potting cups leftover from when we planted our herbs, strawberries, and tomatoes on Earth day so I decided to use those.  Into each one I placed a different item – garlic (which replaced cinnamon in round 1), coffee grounds, chocolate, peanut butter, and grapefruit.

I chopped up the item to release more of the fragrance and then I sealed the pots with aluminum foil and poked holes in the foil for the family to sniff.

I picked up the first pot and passed it around the table for the kids to smell.  It contained peanut butter.  I had to keep telling the kids, “Don’t say what you think it is until everyone has had a turn to smell it!”  Everyone guessed peanut butter correctly.

The next one was coffee and surprisingly everyone got that as well.  I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised since the kids know my order and my husband’s order at Starbucks by heart.

Next we tested the grapefruit.  Finally I stumped someone.  Briana had no idea what that was.  Abby said it was “oranges!”  As it turns out, Abby has quite a strong and accurate sense of smell.  She was the only one to get the next sample, chocolate, right.  Briana would sniff and think and ask for another turn.  Abby, on the other hand, quickly sniffed once and then announced what she thought it was.

The hardest part for me was to curtail the cheating until everyone had a chance to sniff and guess.  Between each sample we sniffed our arms to clear our noses.

  

No one knew what the roasted garlic was, even after I opened it and showed them.  I guess they’d never seen whole roasted cloves of garlic.  Everyone was so sad that the experiment was over, so I decided to make a few more for them to try.

First I made a carrot one.  Carrots, even when chopped, don’t have a strong scent so I was curious what they’d say.  Bree didn’t know.  Even my husband didn’t know.  Abby was the only one to venture a guess.  She guessed lettuce, which is pretty close, especially considering that the only time she’s smelled lettuce is as part of a salad with carrots likely on it.  Go Abby!

The same thing happened when I chopped up the pears.  No one but Abby knew.  She guessed apples, but that’s pretty close and I give her partial credit.

Then we did cinnamon and no one knew what it was even after I opened it.  The final thing that we tried was a trick.  I put potting soil from one of the plants in it and no one had any idea what food smelled like that.  I am sad to say that I was glad no one picked something that I cooked to smell like dirt…I’m not exactly the best chef.  Abby was quick to note that it smells yucky.  Once I showed them what it was Abby said it smelled like our backyard and the grass.

Once again, no one wanted the experiment to end, so I told the kids about the concept of saturation.  I explained that we had smelled so many thing that our noses were saturated, or all full of molecules, and that anything else we smelled would be harder to guess.

We ended the days' fun with a quick review of our senses - noses to smell, eyes to see, mouth to taste, ears to hear, and fingers to touch.

All week long the kids have been talking about the molecules that are in their noses.  We smelled everything from construction molecules while driving to school to the imaginary dirty diaper molecules on Abby’s doll, Camilla.  On occasion it has been used to bust me for Halloween candy theft as Abby told me when she got up from her nap the next day, “these molecules are in my nose and I smell you ate the chocolate!”  Lesson learned.

<3 Pedigreed Housewife