More Taking Care of Teeth

We continued our dental health unit on Thursday and Friday with even more activities on taking care of our  teeth. We've worked- and played- hard this week!

Here we are playing a spinner game with bean "teeth" to see who could fill the mouth up first. Careful not to pull a cavity (black bean) out of the cup!

We looked for pictures of things that are healthy/ unhealthy for our teeth and put them together in class collages:

We flossed some sticky food (play dough) out of teeth (megablocks).

Everyone drew a healthy thing for teeth on a tooth shape to make our big healthy smile for the hall.

We worked on a book about good dental habits.

Here we are making tooth fairy wands to go with our circle time story about Mabel the Tooth Fairy.

The legos on the rug actually had nothing to do with teeth, but such a great wall built as a team is worthy of recognition! :)

Remember this? These are the eggs we soaked in fruit punch, soda, and vinegar earlier this week.

Today we worked to clean those stained teeth. We scrubbed with toothbrushes, water, and toothpaste.

Then we scrubbed some more....

And some more...

And still MORE scrubbing until they were as white as we could make them

None of them ever got as clean as they were before soaking in the drinks, but our hard work made them a lot better. We put them all out on the table, and took turns coming up to cast votes for which egg got the best scrubbing. In order to vote, we put a bean right next to the cleanest egg. After counting all the beans we found that 6 people agreed on the cleanest one, twice the amount of votes received by any other egg. J-- and C--- were the proud super scrubbers! Lesson learned: Don't forget to brush your teeth really well every single day.

After voting, it was time to take a look at the egg that had soaked in vinegar for 2 days. First, we passed around a plain hardboiled egg and talked about how it felt. Some of the observations were hard, smooth, and white. We were reminded that the hard shell protects the softer insides of the egg, just like the hard outside of a tooth - the enamel- protects the softer inside. Then the vinegar soaked egg was passed around. Boy, did that feel different!

Some of us thought it felt soft, squishy, even ICKY! The hard shell wasn't hard anymore. Nobody wants teeth like that.

We ended our day with some apple smiles for snack:

Have a great weekend, (and don't forget to brush!)