Having recently enjoyed a sensory game where she smelled items from the pantry, I thought Veronika might like marrying that game to another favorite: Painting!

To set up, I set out white paint and then chose spices with scents across the board, from spicy to sweet to earthy and back again. Our lineup included:

• cinnamon
• black pepper
• turmeric
• paprika
• ginger

For each spice, I poured a little white paint into a paper cup and then tapped in some of the spice. It was hard to get the mixtures to turn out exactly as I wanted. Too little spice and they just looked like flecks in the white paint. Too much and it became too dry to spread.

Of course Veronika wasn’t bothered about the consistency! I held each cup up to her nose and described what she was smelling. Cinnamon was sweet, paprika was spicy, and so on. Even though we could also smell the paint, she seemed to enjoy it!

Then she began smearing the paints all over a piece of black paper (which I thought would look best against the white paint). Whoops, she managed to dump some spices out, too, before I screwed the lids back on tightly.

Older kids can be more deliberate and careful with the activity, either making a guessing game out of it, or making brushstrokes of each paint on the paper and labeling them.

It wasn’t long before Veronika tested out some of the spicy paint on her legs, too. Which meant it was time for clean up!