30 minute presentation to 28 3rd graders next week. We do not need to meet all objectives below, but must meet at least 1.
Goal: students will demonstrate good oral hygiene skills and understand how those skills can promote lifelong oral health.
Objectives: List components of good OH, such as flossing qd and brushing teeth bid. Verbalize proper brushing technique. Demonstrate proper flossing technique. Choose healthy snacks for good OH from a list of selections. Describe oral damage prevention techniques such as use of mouth guards, toothpicks, and emergency care. Define cavities, plaque, & gum disease. Identify, sketch, and label parts of a tooth such as enamel, dentin, pulp, crown, gum, & root. Explain how to select a good toothbrush & toothpaste, using such qualifiers as small head, soft bristles, and fluoride.
OK here's what we were thinking for the actual presentation. A brief talk about the subjects above (objectives), followed by a demonstration of how to floss: we will use our fingers as "teeth" and a piece of ribbon as "floss", showing how to rub the floss along the sides of each tooth. We're hoping to borrow a set of big plastic teeth and a giant toothbrush to demonstrate proper brushing techniques... haven't been able to secure those yet, though. Show a mouthguard and talk about what to do if you (for instance) crash your bike and break your teeth off or knock 'em out. Teacher requested we talk about how dangerous toothpicks can be to the gums. Then:
Have a big posterboard with some sort of gory picture (pictures?) of diseased teeth, cavities, etc. on it. This posterboard will be covered with 3x5 cards or squares, which have cool trivia facts and questions on them. Kids this age love fascinating trivia and gross pictures. The concept we're still working on, but basically we're thinking of a cross between a "memory" game and Trivial Pursuit - where each kid gets to come up and select a card to pull off and read the fact / question to the class and / or try to answer the question. As each card is pulled off, the picture behind is revealed. That's another area I'm kinda stuck in. Should we have one giant picture and they're trying to figure out what it is, or should we have several pictures in various areas which are slowly revealed? I'm thinking several would be better because one giant picture would be pretty easily guessed what it is after only a few cards are removed. Also during this "game", we could have the kids who are sitting at their desks either drawing or coloring in some tooth pictures. I was thinking of maybe having them make "drawer liners" for their bathroom drawers, with inspirational sayings about oral hygiene, stickers, smiley faces, etc on construction paper. We might or might not laminate it with contact paper.
We want to do some handouts for the kids to take home, with websites they can look at with their families, healthy snack ideas, info about mouthguards for parents, maybe some word search puzzles, and maybe even a brushing chart (http://kids-world.colgate.com/images/game/brushchart_chart.gif)
Other things we'd like to cover are smoking & smokeless tobacco, maybe do some sort of Mad-Lib type story about oral hygiene with the kids adding funny adjectives & stuff to make the story humorous (but with a moral, of course, lol). Maybe a self-contract or pledge having something to do with how many times a week they will brush or floss.
We really wanted to hand out free kid-appropriate toothbrushes, toothpaste samples, floss, and disclosing tablets - but haven't yet found any cooperative dentists in the area. Even the big toothbrush / toothpaste companies wanted to charge us for them.
So, any suggestions on how to keep this around 30 minutes and/or improve it???? Anyone actually have 3rd graders that would like to give advice on what's appropriate for that age? My kids are much older, and my teammate doesn't have kids at all.
