Healthy Teeth

Kindergarten Healthy Teeth Lesson

Kindergarten Content Standard 1 Objective 1: Indicator a. Describe proper care of the body (e.g., proper brushing of teeth, eating a variety of foods, proper hand washing, sneezing into sleeve).

Kindergarten Math Standard 3 Objective 3: Collect and organize simple data.

Materials:

Ten eggs

Five toothbrushes

A couple cans of Coke

Five clear cups

Five big posters cut out into teeth

Magazines (The ones that come with the newspaper are good because they include items like food and toothpaste)

Glue, Scissors, Tape

A class web page with a teeth brushing chart

Procedures:

· Ask children why we have teeth? How would life be different if we didn’t have our teeth? Talk about the uses of our teeth such as eating, talking, and smiling.

· Talk to the class about how we take care of our teeth. (Brushing, eating right, dentist) What would happen if we didn’t do these things?

· Divide the class into five groups. Bring out the magazines and give each group one tooth poster.

· Tell the children to look through the magazine and cut and paste anything that is good for your teeth on the inside of this tooth poster. Anything that is bad for your teeth should be pasted on the outside of the tooth. Once this activity is done, talk with the class about what things they pasted and why they put it there. (Foods such as candy and pop would be bad because they have a lot of sugar in them which gives you cavities. Apples and toothpaste are good because they clean your teeth.) Hang up each tooth in the classroom.

· For each group, give two eggs and a cup with coke in it. Tell the class that these eggs are going to be teeth for now. Look how white the eggs are! Can our teeth crack just like these eggs?

· Have each group put only one of their eggs in the cup of coke. Tell them the coke is all the bad things that come into contact with our teeth. What are some examples of things that aren’t good for our teeth?

· Take the eggs and keep them somewhere the class can see till tomorrow.

· The next day, give each group their egg that was soaked in coke. Give them each a toothbrush and let them each scrub at it. Show them how they should scrub (how to brush your teeth). When the egg becomes white again, tell them this is what happens when we brush our teeth. We brush off all the bad things that were on our teeth and make them white and clean again. What’s prettier, the white tooth or the brown one!?

· Ask the class how often we should brush our teeth and what time of day is a good time to do it? Tell them for the next two weeks we are going to try really hard as a class to brush our teeth twice a day. Explain that every night before bed they are to go online to the class webpage that you have set up a teeth brushing chart on. Under their name, they will check whether or not they remembered to brush their teeth twice that day. *You will need to have informed the parents about this activity, whether by phone or by note. They will likely need a parent to help them get on the webpage. Having the children do progress tracking at home gets the family involved and ties the classroom together, even though they are away from school. If there are any problems or if a student doesn’t have a computer at home, have the student mark their progress using the classroom computer.

· After two weeks, show the class the chart and form results into a graph (maybe a bar graph or pie graph that’s easy for them to read) so they can see how the class did as a whole on brushing their teeth! Involve the class organizing the information and graphing it. Encourage them to keep brushing!

(I got this idea from UEN http://www.uen.org/Lessonplan/preview.cgi?LPid=14109)