Scrub a dub!

Oh what a week we had learning about health and hygiene.  Besides playing and working on our months, dates and weather and seasons, we worked on talking about making our teeth and bodies healthy. 

We talked about our physical well being first by counting healthy food items and practiced drawing the numbers that represented the amounts.  

Then we did an obstacle course to get our bodies moving and working through balance beams, jumps and races.

After running around the room with our obstacle course we changed gears and brushed our teeth with toothbrushes to wipe out the dirt and bring on the white shine.

We also talked about words that related to the dentist and taking care of teeth.  The children then looked for the first letter of these words next to the picture hint to match them for word and letter recognition to hep prepare them for reading.

Also this week we sorted through magazine photos of food items and placed them on a happy tooth and a sad tooth based on whether or not the food item was good for our bodies or not more of a sometimes food.

We did a little more for our bodies by working on some exercise moves.  While the teachers had a few for us planned, the preschoolers also helped us with some sit ups and push ups.  We were very impressed with their eagerness to work out like they have seen some of their parents do at home!

We played a few games on our iPads this week that had to do with choosing healthy foods as well as preparing them and also games that promote proper hygiene through bathing, grooming and dental care.

We created mouthes with marshmallows for teeth and the children helped to count out the correct amount of teeth we have in our mouth.

On Friday we took on the role of dentist to fill in some cavities.  We used puffy paint which is a mixture of shaving cream and glue and painted a tooth with toothbrushes then topped it off with a splash of sparkle (glitter) in order to show the clean and fixed tooth.  Many of the children took time to brag about what good dentists they were during this activity.

We read a book about how to keep germs to ourselves and the importance of covering our sneeze and washing our hands as well as a book about preparing and growing vegetables in order to make vegetable soup.

To keep our hands healthy and in turn keep our bodies healthy we talked about how many germs are on our hands each day and how afraid germs are of soap. 
 Then, we took a bowl of water and sprinkled pepper all over the surface to represent germs on our hands.  The teachers then took a little bit of liquid soap on their finger, touched the surface and the "germs" ran away from the soap to the sides of the bowl.  This is something anyone can do at home and your children are sure to want to perform this trick over and over again.

Before going home this week we sang more songs by our beloved Dr. Jean where we acted out various food items.  The teacher's favorite was the peeling of the avocado to make guacamole.  Check it out by clicking here.

What's Coming Up?

This coming week we will be talking about transportation.