These past weeks the Hawks have been talking about hygiene. They have been interested in why we eat mints after lunch, why brushing our teeth is important or why rinsing our hands isn’t enough. So we started the hygiene theme with talking about dental and oral hygiene. The Hawks were very interested in watching a video about bacteria in our mouths and how they affect our teeth. We did a craft about brushing our teeth and noticed how precise we need to be while brushing to get all the dirt off. We also talked about how important it is to brush our teeth two times a day, before sleeping and after sleeping, and how our parents should still be helping us with brushing to make sure we catch all the bacteria.
The next day after talking about brushing and taking care of our teeth, one of the Hawks came to tell the teachers that they have a wiggling tooth! What a wonderful coincidence! Once the tooth fell out, we printed out tooth maps to colour in when loosing a tooth. We then talked about how everyone’s milk teeth will start falling out at this age and how that is supposed to happen to make space for our adult teeth. And after our adult teeth come in, we need to take extra good care of them because we won’t get new ones after them! Later during the week we watched another video about xylitol and why we eat mints after lunch. The video showed us how xylitol helps us fight the bacteria that go into our mouths while eating. The Hawks were very interested about this since they have been wondering why they get mints after lunch.
The following week we moved on to hand hygiene. All autumn we have been talking about washing our hands and how it is not possible to properly wash in just 10 seconds. Again, we watched a short video about bacteria being everywhere around us and how we can avoid spreading the germs that might make us sick. We learned that we need to scrub the soap in our hands for 20 seconds before rinsing. That feels like a long time! We then did an activity where the Hawks had to give instructions to their teacher about how to wash some red paint on her hands. The Hawks noticed that just putting the painted hands under water is not enough to clean them and that just quickly rubbing our hands together won’t get the paint off. We need to rub rub rub on all sides of our hands to get all the paint and bacteria off.
To really see the difference between clean and dirty hands, we made agar-agar dishes to grow our own bacteria. Half of the Hawks went around the classroom to touch different surfaces and then touched the agar-agar. The other half of the group washed their hands really well and then touched another container. We then left the bacteria to grow and soon we will see the results! If the Hawks washed their hands well, the other dish shouldn’t have as much bacteria growing in it as the other one. Let’s see how our results are!
