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Home › Articles › Play Time › Sensory Play for Toddlers

Sensory Play for Toddlers

Can You Smell It?

Part Four

By Laura Cone

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Parents teach their toddlers about the primary colors of red, green and blue, but they might not think about the primary odors such as floral, mint and musk.

Angelle Button from New Tampa, Fla., encourages her 2-year-old son, Kody, to literally stop and smell the roses. But her motivation at first was more about protecting her flower garden from her curious toddler. "He loves to smell flowers," Button says. "I taught him that two months ago. Now, whenever he sees a flower he goes up to it and smells it. I have a bunch of flowers in my flower bed and instead of pulling them, I taught him to smell them." She also encourages her son to smell scented candles and soaps.

How We Smell
Experts say it is important for parents to engage their toddlers in sensory play activities to develop all their senses, including smell. If your toddler has a reduced sense of smell, it could be an indication he or she has a mild zinc deficiency or a cold.

Through his sense of smell, a toddler knows his world and is alerted to danger, according to Jackie Silberg from Kansas City, Mo, a workshop leader and author of books on childhood development, including Reading Games For Young Children (Gryphon House, 2005).

Experts say people can distinguish more than 10,000 different smells through olfactory receptor neurons lining their noses. Each receptor is encoded by a different gene, which recognizes various odorants. If your toddler's DNA is missing a gene or if the gene is damaged, it can cause him to be unable to detect a certain smell.

When Button's son smells flowers, he is really smelling the esters, or organic molecules, evaporating from the flowers. Esters can now be made artificially. Although manufacturers produce diapers, toys and crayons for toddlers with artificial scents, Silbert suggests exposing children to natural smells.

Smelling Games
Silberg recommends parents play what she calls "smell games" with their toddlers to help develop their sense of smell. "The sense of smell plays an important role in our sense of well-being and quality of life," Silberg says. "The sense of smell brings us into harmony with nature, warns us of dangers and sharpens our awareness of other people, places and things. Almost everything has its very own smell."

One game is a "smell pictures" game. Let your toddler cut out picturesshe likes to smell and paste them onto a piece of construction paper. "Talk about the pictures and use words to describe the smells: sweet, strong, bad, good," Silberg says. Parents may also take old jars and fill them with different items such as lemons or cotton balls soaked in vinegar, peppermint or vanilla extract, she says.

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