KinderBoys: Dentists and Doctors

Yay!  We finally had all five of our KinderBoys at class this week to talk about Dentists as Community Workers.  I only squeezed in some information about Doctors when there was downtime.  I'll explain as I go.

I'll be the first to admit that this lesson quickly turned in to a class that was mostly about oral health care.  But we started off on Dentists, at least.

HEre's the book that I led the discussion with:



It did the trick, but the photos were pretty outdated. I'd go with something more up to date like



The night before the class I soaked to uncooked eggs in vinegar and orange juice (one in each, not a mix of both).

By the next morning, the vinegar egg was very soft, almost leathery, like a snake egg. I let the boys touch it (some of them would not) and explained the effects of sugar and acids on our teeth.  The OJ egg was starting to thin, and it had some darker pinpoint markings on it, but wasn't at all soft, so I didn't bother showing it.

I showed them that when our tooth enamel is worn away by bad foods that stick to our teeth for too long, that it's easy for them to get holes (cavities).  I poked a hole in the soft leathery egg and the yellow yoke came oozing out.  It  made my point.

So we had a talk about what kinds of foods are good for our teeth and which are not! I let the kids decide if our paper food made their teeth happy or sad and put them up on the chart:

We talked about the enamel on teeth being the hard protective coating to keep the"bugs" out.  To illustrate this hard, shiny coating on teeth, I gave each boy a tooth cut from card stock and we painted them with evaporated milk.  Simple and quick. I think it took 3minutes total.  I did it early on in the lesson so they'd have time to dry. It really does look cool when it dries.

Last night, I also hard boiled some eggs and soaked them in a strong solution of PERO.


I keep this on hand because I do not drink coffee.  You can find it at most grocery stores too.

Here are my soaking eggs

I gave a "dirty tooth" to each boy on a paper towel, and we talked about how to brush our teeth gently but firmly using small circular motions.   I got out a clean new tooth brush and we took turns brushing. There was  a bowl of clean water on the table for rinsing the brush.  So while the boys were waiting a turn, I grabbed another book to read out loud



I had my stethoscope handy

And I went around the table letting the boys listen to their own heart beats.

By that time everyone was done brushing. I should mention that I had another mom in the room monitoring the brushing while I was reading and doing the stethoscope. Otherwise, this would not have worked.

Side note: I asked the boys what they thought their hearts looked like.  Surprisingly, most of them thought they had cute valentine shaped hearts beating away inside their little chests!  So I got out my heart model

And showed them what was REALLY beating away inside them.
My son was not thrilled with this activity since we JUST finished a six week unit on the heart.
"Moooooooom. I already know thiiiiiis"
So we quickly moved on.  As the mom in charge, I have that prerogative. I host this class for my son's benefit, so I try to mostly follow his interests.

Ok, so we also talked about cleaning between our teeth. To practice flossing I gave the boys some legos with home made playdough bits stuck in between and we flossed out the playdough with yarn.

Then I felt like we were ready for the main activity of the day, brushing our own teeth!  In preparation for this, I bought some disclosure tablets


 and I disolved them in a small amount of water

Now, we had tried this as a family first by just chewing the tablets and swishing for 30 seconds. This worked REALLY well but was a little hard to brush off. So I thought we'd try it this way because I figured some of the kids would not be wild about chewing up a pink tablet.  As it was, we still had a couple boys that chose not to swish with the "magic tooth potion".  But most of them did.  IT takes some time to dissolve the tablets, so do it well ahead of time.

I had asked all the boys to bring a toothbrush and toothpaste in a baggie with their name on it.  So we headed off with our swish and our baggies to see just how good a job we had done of brushing this morning.

Pink teeth!  We've got some brushing to do!

After our teeth were nice and clean, we settle in for a snack and a story to wrap up the day.  Oh, first we all needed bathroom breaks, so while that was happening I picked up my Dr. book again to read to the "waiters".  It gave us a chance to talk about temperatures and thermometers.

Our snack time book was





Fun class with all our KinderBoys!  We've talked a lot about communities and the workers that live here to help us stay safe, healthy and productive! Next week we'll be taking a trip to a local historical museum to learn more about what makes our particular community unique.


In the mean time you can check in on the cooking class that my girls are taking at a friend's house:
http://4littlepiglets.blogspot.com/2013/03/cooking-class-part-5.html