Marty the Mighty Nose is a cartoon character created by The Fragrance Foundation to encourage children aged 7-11 to be inspired and engaged through their sense of smell. Offering a website aimed at teachers, full of ideas to extend their pupil’s learning by focusing on the smelly world around them, and a series of free workshops for schools; perhaps the most exciting activity for kids to get involved with is the annual Mighty Nose Awards…
Every year, The Fragrance Foundation invite pupils to submit smell-inspired creative writing for the chance to win fantastic prizes for themselves and for their schools. And entries for 2017 are now open!
The competition closes on December 16th 2016, so click here to download your entry pack and learn more.
As the Fragrance Foundation explain: ‘Marty the Mighty Nose is supported by a team of people including teachers, and developed by the Fragrance Foundation UK. We are a not-for-profit educational organisation and all our members are in the fragrance industry, supporting Marty as a philanthropic initiative.’
Winners will be whisked to the glittering awards ceremony held at BAFTA next year, as part of the Jasmine Awards, before an audience of writers, fragrance professionals and press, who always receive them with rapturous applause. Truly inspiring, it’s wonderful to see kids explore and develop their sense of smell – and along with it their creativity (and humour!)
We adored hearing last year’s winning poems being read, and to get a sense of how brilliant they were, here’s one of our favourites from 2016…
The Smells Inside My Brother’s Room
By Isaac Littlewood
St Mary’s CE Primary School, Year 3
The smells inside my brother’s room,
Just like his pants are deadly.
They lead me to my utter doom:
A very whiffy medley!
His slippers smell of nasty cheese
And the tang of onions (pickled).
Inside, his toes my nose displease
Especially when they’re tickled!
His bum smells like a rotten drum,
Full of ugly fleas.
It’s worse than getting badly stung
By a swarm of bees.
His armpits smell like cabbage leaves
Rotting at the dump.
Their pong you simply won’t believe
It’s like an evil trump.
Underneath his bed there lurks
A very hissy dragon
Who eats my brother’s hairy shirts
And smells enough to gag on!
So don’t go in that smellsome site
If you value your nose.
Your nostrils will be harmed for life.
His pongs are your greatest foes!
You can read all the winning entries and download the competition pack on Marty the Mighty Nose’s website.
We know so many of our readers enjoy sniffing our Discovery Boxes with their children, and at several of our How to Improve Your Sense of Smell Workshops, people have come along with their kids, who have wholeheartedly thrown themselves into finding creative ways of describing smells. So, if your children are budding ‘noses’ or simply brimming with whiffy words, we urge you to enter them into the competition!
Written by Suzy Nightingale
