Teeth

When I was teaching third grade, I was the health specialist for all of the third grade classes. Twice a week I got to teach them great stuff about how our body works and what we can do to keep our minds and body healthy. We got to do a lot of cool stuff like look at the effects of smoking on a real pig's lung and study what the inside of our body looks like. I guess I have never really lost that passion because I already want to incorporate some of those things into our curriculum.

We had a tooth day in class. We talked about our teeth, counted them, and discussed how to take care of them. We talked about tooth brushes and toothpaste. If it weren't the day after labor day, I would have called a local dentist to get some free goody bags full of great stuff for our teeth or you could take a field trip to the office. After we talked about teeth, we "brushed" a paper tooth to practice how long to brush and how we need to brush the whole tooth. Each child got a brush to use and I made a toothpaste/glue mixture. I would say it was 1/4 toothpaste and 3/4 glue. They brushed their tooth and when it dried it looked like it had toothpaste on it and it had that great minty scent.

Here is the outline I used for the paper teeth. You can re-size it to fit your needs.