Teaching kids about dental health.
In addition to the "three Rs," teaching children basic hygiene often falls to educators of young children. One aspect of this is dental care. Students will come to class with varying degrees knowledge about caring for their teeth, so assessing initial knowledge is important when beginning a dental health education program. The classroom poster board ideas that follow are ways that you, as a teacher, can have a positive influence on your students throughout their lives.
Brushing Poster
Create a poster board that helps make brushing fun, so your students will be more likely to brush their own teeth. On poster board, paste pictures of several sets of yellow teeth made out of yellow construction paper. Give each student an inexpensive toothbrush and provide white paint mixed with a few drops of mint extract. Have the students brush the yellow teeth with the minty-white paint and explain that brushing their own teeth (with toothpaste) will keep their teeth white as well. For a large class, make several poster boards. Hang the poster boards to display the students' clean teeth masterpieces.
Student Smiles
Create a poster board or bulletin board from pictures of your students' smiles. Take close-up pictures of each student's mouth and print out the pictures. Using white construction paper, create a board with cutouts of teeth large enough for each one to fit a smile picture. Glue the pictures onto the teeth. Have the students come up with a sentence to write under their smile picture that talks about how they keep their teeth healthy, like "I brush my teeth twice a day" or "I eat fruit instead of candy." The title of each poster can say, "Look Who Is Smiling" and you can use them on parent-teacher night to see if parents can guess their child's smile.
Animal Teeth
Divide your class into several groups. Each group will select an animal that you can find at the zoo. The groups will perform research to find out what dental procedures are needed to keep the animals' teeth clean. Once the groups have completed the posters, have each group make a presentation about their particular animal. By seeing the importance of dental health in these animals, students will understand that dental health is important to them, as well. If you are able, have a local zoologist come by to give additional dental facts for each animal.
Healthy Smile Food
Have your students create posters about the best ways to eat for a healthy smile. Each individual or group can focus on different foods to avoid or to choose to improve their dental health. One group can focus on avoiding sticky, sweet candies and replacing them with yogurt and fruit. Another poster could be about the health benefits of foods high calcium and the importance of maintaining low levels of mouth acid. Each student or group can then present information to the class, perhaps accompanied by a sample of the healthy food.
Tags: dental health, their teeth, poster board, your students, construction paper
