They demonstrated the proper to way to brush our teeth. The kids were thrilled to be practicing on a big, orange kangaroo who was sporting a full set of pearly whites. I actually thought he looked kinda creepy - but shhhh...don't tell.
They also showed us how to brush and floss that hard-to-get "tooth dirt" off of our teeth (aka plaque). The hygienist lathered her hands in icing to represent the plaque. The kids brushed her hands in a circular motion to remove the icing from the fronts and backs of her hands. When they were finished, the kids were able to see all of the plaque that was still present between her fingers. The kids then took big rubber bands, representing the floss, and flossed between her fingers to remove the plaque between the "teeth."
I was so proud of everything our classes learned from this unit. They answered all of the dentist's questions correctly and really represented our school well. I think the Waccamaw staff thought so too :)
Prior to the dentist's visit, we did several activities to understand what good dental health is and what we need to do to keep our teeth healthy. We began by graphing who had been to the dentist and who had not.
We then took dental health statements and decided whether they belonged on the "true" toothbrush or the "false" toothbrush. For our first try at this, we gave educated guesses that we later reviewed after watching a cute video called Tooth Wisdom. After the video, we checked our brushes and found that we only had a few statements on the wrong brush. The kids realized they knew a little more than what they originally thought!
One of the statements on the "false" toothbrush read, "Drinking Coke will help your teeth stay white."
To test this theory, we did a little experiment. We placed one egg in water over night and another egg in Coke over night. The kids each gave their hypothesis on what they thought would happen to the egg in Coke. The majority of them thought the egg would change colors while a close second thought the egg would explode.
The following day we examined the eggs to find that the egg in water was still white while the egg in Coke had turned a yucky brown color :(
This proved that Coke can stain your teeth and we should probably limit our intake. To see if brushing would help the situation, we used toothpaste and a toothbrush and brushed the egg in a circular motion.
We brushed for two minutes (singing "Happy Birthday") and rinsed the egg to see what our results were...
Tada! We did in fact see that brushing can get the stains off of our teeth. So, in conclusion, the egg did change colors which we noted on our papers.
I love the hypothesis pictures of the egg exploding. I think secretly the kids all wanted this to happen!
We continued our unit brainstorming foods that are good for our teeth and bad for our teeth. We made a collage for each category by cutting out foods from various magazines. The kids had no problem determining what was good and bad. I did have one student ask me if candy corns were good since they had corn in them. Ha! This is why I love kindergarten!
We also completed a sentence telling the importance of flossing. The sentence read, "It is important to floss because __________________________. Look how cute our writings turned out!
To throw in something really fun, we played Guess Who? Teeth Edition. How well do you think you would do in this game?
Believe it or not, many of the kids couldn't even guess their own teeth! We still had a lot of fun trying to figure out whose teeth belonged to who...
And finally, we graphed and tallied how many teeth we all have lost. I was surprised to see two of the kids had lost 6 teeth each! We even had a few who hadn't lost any. But the majority of the kids had lost one tooth.
This class sure is keeping the Tooth Fairy busy! Here's to healthy mouths and beautiful smiles!
