“Cheese” whiz! The Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl. Did you stay up too late last night? I sure did! Shouldn’t someone suggest playing the game on a Saturday? Ha! True to form, my favorite part of the game was the commercials. And my favorite one? The Volkswagen car commercial featuring the mini Darth Vader. I hope you saw it. I’m smiling right now just thinking about it!
Speaking of smiles, let’s talk teeth and dental health. How do you include this topic in your February teaching plans? Do you plan group activities? Learning centers? Independent activities? Games? Be sure to share your students’ favorite activities too!
Smiles,
Diane
I do the usual activities as far as dental. But a bit of info that came my way was that Dental students are required to do dental presentations as part of their class requirements. Try your local schools to find a resource. Its a bit of extra work. You need to meet with the students prior and do some paperwork. But by doing the extra work you get a new program each year because each student must come up with their own educational activities vs the same thing the whole dental office offers.
You can get songs, games etc. You just never know what these tooth fairy students will bring.
This is an awesome tip, Darlene! Thanks so much for sharing!
Loved the Super Bowl commercials. Bummed, though, that the Steelers lost. 🙁
We cover dental health within our Celebrations theme. Most of our activities are in learning centers. We have teeth-brushing sequencing cards, for example. We also do painting with tooth brushes.
We do a small group tooth-counting game, though. We use small marshmallows to resemble teeth, and the first person to fill his/her mouth-shaped board with 32 marshmallows is the winner.
We always have a parent that is a dental assistant come in and do a presentation/movie about dental health. They give out toothbrushes and toothpaste to each child. We use a toothbrush and childrens toothpaste to paint a tooth. The children make a construction paper and napkin bristle toothbrush. We put a chart on it which they check each time they brush their teeth. When they bring it back at the end of the month, they get a tooth holder to put their teeth in when they lose them.
The Colgate Corp. sends me a teaching packet every year, including a new toothbrush for every student.
I’m calling my local community college, thanks to Darlene, to see if a dental hygiene student can come and speak to my class. Thanks, Darlene!
We like to do several different experiments. In one experiment we put a hard boiled egg in tea and after a day or so we make our own toothpaste and brush the stains away. We have also put hard boiled eggs in milk, oj and coke and made predictions about what would happen. I love to make tooth fairy pillows with the children using white felt, stuffing,googly eyes and little felt pouches to hold their first lost tooth.