Ten years ago, I started teaching kindergarten. I decided that I wanted to teach my class about the world. So, I decided the best way to do that would be through cooking. They loved it! Teaching the children to cook was so much fun. They were enthusiastic and excited to know what we were going to make. When we would gather to cook. My class would get around a big table and listen to what we were going to make and what country it was from. When I would share the country name, there would always be a child that would say “I have visited there or I have family that lives there.” I would show the children pictures of the country and the continent it was in. The children would get excited to know they were making a recipe from a place they knew. We would start our experience with looking at all the ingredients and talking about each one. Then we would proceed into creating the recipe. I would start out by telling them, that we would need to double or triple a recipe depending on how many that recipe fed. So, not only were the children learning about a country and where that country was located, but they also were learning math skills. The children loved making guesses! The children took turns going around the table and putting ingredients into a bowl or pot and mixing it. They loved being a part of the process and were more eager to try the recipe when it was finished cooking. The children would go home and share with their parents what they made that day. I noticed as time went on, I was hearing back from the parents how their children were asking to be involve in cooking at home. This was very exciting for me. The other thing that I discovered as the year went on, was how the children were paying attention to the smells of the different recipes and how they remembered who they were with and where they were. This was so exciting for me. I had read that the sense of smell which is created in the olfactory bulb, which is in the limbic system of the brain, is closely associated with memory and feeling which is sometimes called the “emotional brain.” Smells can bring memories and powerful responses almost instantly. Because the olfactory bulb has a close access to the amygdala, which processes emotion and the hippocampus which is responsible for associative learning. The first time you encounter a smell you link it to an event, person, or moment. The next time you encounter the smell you elicit the memory or mood. This is so exciting for both myself and my students!