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Health

25th Dec 2019

Teacher shows his classroom of kids exactly why it’s so important to wash your hands

Trine Jensen-Burke

washing your hands

We all do it.

Shout ‘WASH YOUR HANDS BEFORE YOU COME OUT’ to our children the minute we hear them using the bathroom, that is.

I know I sure do. But while I have explained why it is important to wash your hands after bathroom breaks – and in general – I am not sure my kids grasp why. Understanding something you can’t see (such as germs), is not easy.

But having seen how one teacher managed to show his class just what happens to things that have been exposed to bacteria – I am now planning on letting my children see his idea– and hopefully, they will know that my hysteria on the washing is rooted in something real.

“We did a science project in class this last month as flu season was starting,” teacher Jaralee Annice Metcalf writes in a now-viral Facebook post. ” We took fresh bread and touched it. We did one slice untouched. One with unwashed hands. One with hand sanitizer. One with washed hands with warm water and soap. Then we decided to rub a piece on all our classroom Chromebooks.”

The bread that had been rubbed on those Chromebooks might be the grossest piece of bread we’ve ever seen, and underscores Jaralee’s point: “As somebody who is sick and tired of being sick and tired of being sick and tired. Wash your hands! Remind your kids to wash their hands! And hand sanitizer is not an alternative to washing hands!”

Health bodies, such as the HSE; agrees with what Jaralee says: Handwashing is all sorts of important. It reduces the spread of respiratory illnesses, winter flu and colds.

In other words; kids need to wash their hands and they need to be taught how to do it correctly.

Jaralee’s social media post came under some criticism by people questioning the conditions of her experiment, but the crafty teacher was quick to remind everyone: “We are an elementary school. Not a fancy CDC lab, so relax a little and WASH YOUR HANDS.”