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Make a scented apple painting activity to bring on the fall season in the preschool classroom. Red, yellow, green, and brown paint mixed with ground cinnamon enables children of preschool age to get a comprehensive sensory experience when making festive apple art. It is the easy way of motivating creativity or locating motor development and sensory exploration at preschool art centre.
Why Try Scented Apple Painting?
Adding cinnamon to paint brings a fresh element to the art centre. The scent invites students to slow down, explore, and stay engaged. It also gives a new purpose to familiar materials, encouraging creativity in a way that feels exciting and new. Along the way, students build important skills:
- Sensory exploration through smell and texture
- Fine motor strength as they paint inside apple outlines
- Creative expression using fall colours and scents
Simple changes like this can help keep classroom routines feeling new and meaningful.
How to Set Up Scented Apple Painting:
All it takes is a few ingredients and a few minutes of prep.
You’ll Need:
- Paintbrushes or cotton swabs
- Red, green, yellow, and brown washable paint
- Ground cinnamon
- Small plastic cups
- Apple outline printouts
To Make the Paint:
Put a healthy dose of cinnamon with each colour. It is possible to have it pre-mixed in small cups or have students add it in themselves to add a bit of added sensory experience.
Applying the Scented Apple Painting Activity with the Classrooms:
This activity is flexible enough for a variety of settings. Whether it’s added to the art centre or introduced as a small group project, it offers lots of opportunities for creativity and learning.
At the Art Centre:
Set out the cinnamon-scented paints with apple outlines, brushes, and paper. Students can be allowed to paint realistic apples red or green or perhaps create apple pie patterns or mix paints or even pie-inspired artwork. Place a small jar of cinnamon close at hand so they can smell it and before they paint or some they can add a little sprinkled on the top to give extra texture.
In Small Groups:
The activity is suitable to work with the small groups of 34 children. Present the items, demonstrate the dipping and paint and discuss the order. The following questions can be asked:
- What is this fragrance reminding you?
- In what colours are apples?
- Can you think of different ways we can eat apples?
Extend the Learning:
Books to Pair With the Activity
Science Connection:
After painting, talk about where cinnamon comes from. Show a cinnamon stick and let students compare it to the powdered version they used in their paint.
Include a Sensory Centre of Cinnamon Play Dough:
Want some other idea to feel the fragrance of cinnamon? Try adding a batch of Apple Cinnamon Play Dough to your sensory or fine motor centres. It is a soft texture, easy to prepare, rolls, fall like the recipe. Students are not only able to roll, press, flatten the dough themselves, they can also involve their senses of smell, vision, touch.
A Fall Favourite for the Art Centre:
The apple paint activity is a simple one that combines sights, smells and the feel on fall into a single meaningful experience. It only requires few supplies and a dash of cinnamon to give a new vibe to the art centre and open creativity in an unimaginative manner. Apple scented painting, used either in centres or small groups is a classroom favourite very easy to come back to during the season, and of course even through the season.
