Sense of Smell and Touch Christmas Activity

I got the chance to work with the kids in my son's classroom last week. I found this idea online and transformed it to fit kindergartners. I lead one of the centers the kids worked through. I had 20 minutes with each group of about 5 students. 

For the prep work the night before, I started by making some stockings. I cut pieces of red and green felt as shown below. Then I sewed on some cotton balls across the top. 

I sewed the stocking together so the top opened. I found Christmas-related items to place in the stockings. The kids had to feel what was inside and make a guess using their sense of touch. I put a toy car, a stuffed animal, a piece of an artificial Christmas tree, Sands Alive (fake snow), a candy cane, and some coal. (I found bags of candy coal at Meijer. This was the kids' favorite item because I had enough pieces of coal to give all of them when we were done :)) 

I wrote A, B, C, D, E, and F on the front of the stockings with a fabric marker. (See in the final picture at the bottom of the post.)

These are the worksheets I made to go with this part of the project. The kids drew what they thought was inside, and if they were able, they wrote it on the lines below. 

It was a lot of fun seeing the wonder on the kids' faces. 

Then we worked on their sense of smell. 

I created fake chimneys to place the scents in. 

I started by attaching scrapbook paper to toilet paper rolls (I did this with hot glue.)

Then I hot glued a piece of tin foil to the bottom of the roll. To help deter the "peeking" I added a piece of brown tulle to the top. I also glued on a piece of construction paper that had the numbers 1-6 on the rolls. The smells I used were an orange, cinnamon sticks, peppermint, pine, chocolate, and marshmallows. The marshmallows were hard for the kids to identify. I would probably do a cookie or something like that if I did it again.

This is the worksheet I created for the chimneys. The kids filled this out like the stocking sheets. The final sheet was a conclusion page for us to discuss together. It asked them how many smells and feels they guessed correctly and then which one was their favorite. 

The smell activity was definitely a little harder than the touch exercise, but the kids really had a lot of fun guessing.  

These are the finished stockings and chimneys.