Education: Classroom Activity

The Nose Knows

(Grades K through 3)

This activity was adapted from a Classroom Kit that San Diego area teachers may check out from the San Diego Zoo's Education Department.

• Objective: Students will learn the ways animals use their sense of smell to help them survive in the wild.
• Summary: Each student, holding a scent envelope, uses his or her sense of smell to find other students with a matching scent envelope.
• Time: 30 minutes
• Subjects: Language arts, science
• Grade level: K-3

Materials needed

• Cotton balls
• Different scents (Ideas include vinegar; perfume; or extracts of vanilla, almond, peppermint, anise, maple, and lemon.)
• A brown or manila envelope for each student (Some scent marks have distinctive colors. Using the dark-colored paper encourages the students to use only their noses—and not their eyes—in this activity.)

Preparation

Divide the number of envelopes to be used by the number of scents you have collected. Before the lesson, use a cotton ball to rub a scent onto the adhesive strips of the envelopes. Each envelope gets one scent only. Repeat this process with the remaining scents and envelopes. For example, if you have 32 students in your class and have eight different scents, then four envelopes would get one scent, four would get another, and so on.

Method

1. Give each student a scented envelope. Tell the students to smell their envelope, and then have them try to find classmates whose envelopes smell like their own. After about 10 minutes of sniffing, make sure each student is in a "scent" group.
2. Have students brainstorm adjectives describing how it felt to rely on their sense of smell to locate other students. Review the different ways animals use scent.

Teacher background

Many animals have a keen sense of smell to help them identify what’s going on around them. They can recognize other species, as well as individuals within their own species, by scent. Detecting other animals by scent helps an animal to stay away from enemies, avoid being eaten, find a mate, locate food, and mark territory.

Here are some fun animal scent facts to share with your students:

• Jaguars are nocturnal animals that rely on their sense of smell to find prey in the dark.
• Giant pandas usually live alone, but they can use their keen sense of smell to find each other in thick bamboo forests.
• The rhinoceros has poor eyesight. It relies on its strong sense of smell to find other rhinos, even when they’re far away.
• Brown hyenas live in groups called "packs." Pack members put their scents on rocks, grass, bushes, and trees to mark and defend the area they live in.
• Komodo dragons’ keen sense of smell helps these lizards to zero in on rotting meat from more than a mile (1.6 kilometers) away.
• Asian lions live in groups called "prides." They leave scent marks to warn other lions to stay away from the pride’s territory.
• Gazelles use their keen sense of smell to tell when a predator is sneaking up on them.
• Elephants use their long noses, called "trunks," to smell the air for danger that might be nearby.