Healing Plant Smell Match

Crush a leaf, hold it out, ask which picture it belongs to. That is the whole activity, and preschoolers are startlingly good at it.

Smell is the sense we ignore in early years teaching and it is the one that lasts longest. A child who has smelled crushed lemongrass at three will recognise it at thirty. That is not a claim about memory science, it is what we see with children who have come back to visit years later.

The four plants on this sheet are chosen because they grow easily in pots across the tropics, they are safe to handle, and each one is genuinely used as a medicine or a repellent in the region. The page includes what each plant does, in language you can say out loud to a three year old.

A note on failure. The first time we ran this, we used dried herbs. It did not work. Fresh, crushed in front of the child, or not at all.