Did Team Awesome come home last week and tell you they were covered in cooties? Mrs. Bowden's cooties to be more specific. For children germs are invisible things that cause them to get sick. Remembering to do things like washing their hands or covering a cough may not come easily. With the sneezing and sniffles that seem rampant in our classroom right now, using a visual tool that demonstrates how germs spread and the effectiveness of different hand washing and cleaning methods seemed like a smart idea. Enter the Glo Germ Classroom Kit! Secretly I applied the 'fake germ' powder from the kit to my hands then carrried on with a normal afternoon but made sure to touch each child at least once and handle a few things in the classroom. We then discussed how germs spread and used the black light, which causes the powder to glow, to track where my germs had dispersed. We were amazed at how many things I touch in our classroom and how far the germs had spread! Some of the children even had some in their hair. I then washed my hands and we looked at them under the black light again. Unfortunately, I did not wash my hands well enough to get rid of most of the germs. So we watched a video from Clarence The Cat on how to wash our hands properly and another one on when we should wash our hands and then I washed them a second time. Team Awesome made a committment to try and wash their hands a bit more often as well as a bit more thoroughly- probably due to their slight disgust at the thought of all the germs in our classroom.
