Student Worksheet

What Can You Smell? - Activity Instructions

Do you know your smells? Your skills are about to be tested! You’ll have a series of cotton buds, all with different smells on them, and it’s up to you to identify them.

Part A: Senses

Step 1.

Begin by having a discussion with those doing this activity with you around the following question:

What do you already know about your senses?

Our senses help us to understand the world around us. Our senses send messages to our brain about what is happening around us. This can help us to avoid danger, like when we smell smoke from a bushfire, or when there is a loud noise, like a thunderclap. Our taste buds help us decide which foods are safe to eat by reacting to foods that are too salty, sour or bitter. When we get bitten by ants or touch spiky plants we get messages to our brain telling us to avoid the area where those ants or plants are.

Take a moment to test your senses:

What can you hear?
What can you see?
What can you feel/touch?
What can you taste?
What can you smell?

Tuning into our senses is also a great way to relax. A simple relaxation activity could be to head outside and use your senses to observe nature.

Step 2.

How often do you use your sense of smell? Have a think about how you might have used your sense of smell today.

For most of us, we use our sense of smell when smelling nice things, like baking bread and flowers, or to avoid yucky things, like rotting food. For many animals, though, a sense of smell is one of the most important senses for their survival. Animals use their sense of smell to find out who has recently visited their territory, who is a friend and who is an enemy, where there is danger, where there is food, and probably a whole range of other things we don’t even know about.

In this activity you’re going to imagine you’re an animal and focus on your sense of smell.

Part B: Experiment

Step 1.

Gather your materials:

Cotton wool buds
Anything from inside the house that has a distinct smell and that can be applied to a cotton bud, such as: eucalyptus oil, vanilla essence, coconut essence, almond essence, perfume, antiseptic lotion or solution, dishwashing liquid, vinegar, fish sauce, or rub the cotton buds with different herbs such as mint or basil.
Paper, scissors and pen to make labels
Plates or plastic trays/tubs to place cotton buds on
Rubber gloves (optional)

Step 2.

Carefully soak one cotton bud with one of the smells you collected and place it on a plate or plastic tray. Label each smell as you go.

Step 3.

Once you have a range of smells on your plate you can start smelling each cotton bud carefully and thinking about some of the following questions:

Have you ever smelt this before?
Does it remind you of another smell?
Is it a good smell or a bad smell?
Does it suggest a warning or something nice?
Does it smell like food or something to avoid?
Do you like the smell?

Step 4.

Turn to the table below. Add each of the things that you used in your smell test to the first column of the table. In the second column add any descriptive notes you have about this smell, such as ‘sharp’, ‘sweet’ or ‘yucky’.

Take It Further

With the help of an adult, you could go into the kitchen and smell and taste some of the jars of food in the kitchen or cupboards, testing to see whether the smells tell you anything about how they might taste. You could also test what happens when you block your nose when tasting something - can you taste the food more or less with your nose blocked?

What Can You Smell? (home learning)

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