Toddler Science: Smell

I had wanted to keep up with the weekly Unplugged projects, but through the summer we spent a lot of time outdoors and it fell to the wayside. This last week Meredith wasn’t feeling well and had no interest in going outside, getting dressed, or really doing much besides cuddling on the couch. In my search for some quiet, easy indoor activities, I went and checked out the Unplugged blog and saw the theme for the next week was “smell”. It reminded me of an activity I’d read about and filed away for a later time. Now seemed perfect.

The idea is to create your own homemade perfume. We don’t actually use perfume, and I had no intention of actually wearing it, but I thought it would be something fun for Meredith to help out with. The only downside to doing this now is that our garden is pretty much dead. At the time that I had first seen it, we had lavender and roses and other yummy smelling things out there. But we were able to make due.

We filled three jars with a cup of water each. In the first jar, we put some orange peels. The second one had cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. I chose the spices but she dumped them in. The third I let her go to town a little bit on. I gave her some jars of spices and let her smell them all and told her she could put some in the last jar. She put a whole lot of rosemary, and smaller amounts of basil, thyme, and oregano. We put lids on the jars and then she shook them up and we sat them aside to sit over night.

The next day we pulled out the jars and I pointed out to her how the colour of the water had changed in all three jars. She unscrewed the lids, and we used new jars and poured the mixtures through coffee filters into the jars. She loved this part, as she was able to do it mostly on her own. I did do the oranges, but when I realized the filters would stay put on their own she did the rest. She poured a little too fast for the first jar, which was the rosemary one. (Excuse the funny cropping/painting in these, once again she was pants-less.)

But she realized quickly on her own that pouring slowly would result in less mess and more of the liquid getting into the jar and didn’t end up spilling any of the cinnamon one.

Then we waited for them all to strain and I squeezed out the filters a little bit.

Now we had three jars of strained “perfume”. The orange and rosemary one turned out really well, but I don’t think we used enough cinnamon in the third one. I kept the orange peels aside and brought out the jars of cinnamon and rosemary spices and had her smell them and then the “perfume” jars in turn, and asked her if she could tell which ones were used in which perfume. She figured out the orange one quite quickly, though she pointed out that the water was yellow, not orange. She didn’t seem to get the cinnamon and rosemary ones though.

Overall I think this was a fun project to demonstrate some different scents to her. I think it would be fun to repeat it when she’s a bit older and can understand better how the scents transfer to the water, and also when we have some things in our garden we could use for it. One unexpected benefit at her age though was watching her pour the jars out. I could see her noticing how the water went pretty slowly through the filters, and adjusting the speed of her pouring based on that. She experimented with faster and slower pouring and seemed quite intrigued by the whole thing. I think I am going to think up some sort of pouring experiment for her involving different filters, as well as different substances to pour. I have even had some ideas for some simple diffusion and osmosis experiments, though those ones might have to wait a year or two. It’s neat how so many ideas can come out of one simple project though!