Strong smelling playdough

The world is full of many different smells; some weird, wonderful and breathtakingly bad. In this post I use basic playdough and a mixture of strong smelling powders to create a wonderful sensory experience for kids.

This is a sponsored post by Lonely Planet Kids

I’m sure like most parents, I want to bring up my children to appreciate the world around them and see how diverse and magnificent it can be. Sometimes that can be hard to do because travel can be so expensive.

Allow me to introduce you to a fabulous new range of books by Lonely Planet Kids. These books are all designed to excite and inspire children to learn about the world they live in right in their own home. They are written in such a way that they are super child-friendly and full of cool and quirky facts. 

Possum (aged 3 years) was drawn to one particular book in the range called, ‘Adventures of Smelly Places’. The name, as it suggests, shares factual and fun information about the various smells from around the world, some nice and some not so nice. She was so engrossed in this book I knew I wanted to take her interest further.

After spending a long time looking at the brightly coloured pages, learning about interesting facts and playing with the reusable stickers I whipped up a batch of my basic no cook playdough. We talked about smells that were familiar to us and discussed the ones we like and dislike.

Super Smelling Play Dough

I divided the dough into three and with great care I began mixing curry powder into one, paprika into another and cocoa powder into the last lump of dough. The smell was so strong and interesting.

Possum’s face lit up in excitement because she could see how the play dough had changed colour and it smelt different too.

I knew that this would be a fabulous sensory experience for Possum while she played with the super smelly playdough. With her sense of smell I wanted her to be taken on a journey to exciting countries that are known for the smells in the playdough and described in the Lonely Planet Kids book, ‘Adventures of Smelly Places’.

We enjoyed playing a game with the scented playdough. Using only her sense of smell, Possum had to guess which ball of playdough had what spice. It was lots of fun.

We also loved using the Lonely Planet Kids atlas because it has such great maps and pictures that allowed us to make a great connection to the places that the smells from the playdough had originated from. 

She couldn’t wait to share her new Lonely Planet Kids books with her daddy. It melted my heart to hear her retelling lots of what she learnt and with such excitement and enthusiasm. I’m thrilled we have these Lonely Planet Kids books because they are so fun and will grow with Possum’s interest in the world we live.

What places do you think your child would be interested to know more about?