Hand washing has always been an important life skill to teach from a young age. This year, teaching kids about germs seems to have taken a larger than life role in 2020. We are trying to cover hand washing, coughing and sneezing. In pandemic land, we also have to now be able to explain in depth about how germs spread, and the different types of germs there are out there. Kids are FULL of questions about germs. The impact on our lives from COVID-19 has created more questions for kids. I decided that we needed a project to go along with some of our reading material. My goal? To help us understand how we can fight germs, as well as how our body fights germs on the inside! I hope these activities are helpful as you work on teaching kids about germs.
What You Need for Your Wash Your Hands Project
- oil (olive or canola will work)
- Cinnamon
- water
- soap
- sink or wash basin
Let’s Have Some FUN: Teaching Kids About Germs!
I think one of the toughest parts of the pandemic has been helping my kids understand that we can’t tell if someone has “the germs” just by looking at them. It makes understanding the importance of hand washing difficult as well. Kids don’t think they need to fully wash their hands if they aren’t visibly dirty!
For our activity today, we created some “visible germs” with a little oil and cinnamon. Pour a little bit of oil into your kid’s hands and have them rub it all over. Then do a nice and thorough sprinkling of cinnamon. The cinnamon will help to give you some “germ color”, and is a little easier to clean up instead of glitter!
After their hands are coated, tell them to imagine that the cinnamon is all the invisible germs they can’t see! We all have microscopic germs on our hands from touching surfaces and people throughout the day. Now we need to wash our hands to get rid of them!
Tell them to was their hands without prompting proper hand hygiene and see what happens. Do they use only water? Do they ask for the soap? As they experiment, ask some questions throughout the activity. What would happen if we walked around the house with our germs and didn’t wash our hands first? How about if we only used water to wash our hands and not soap? What happens if we wash for less than 10 seconds? 30 seconds? 1 minute?
Coach them through thorough hand washing technique and point out things they could improve with. As a healthcare worker, I’ve always been taught to wash my hands for the length of time it takes to sing Happy Birthday, twice. I am happy to report that my kids have remembered this every time they wash their hands! I can hear them singing Happy Birthday to the soap from the bathroom. This activity will show the importance of hand washing with soap before/after meals, after playing outside, after using the bathroom, after sneezing or coughing, and especially right now after being in public!
What You Need for Your White Blood Cells Project
- My free printable!
- Scissors (we love these kid ones)
- glue stick
- laminator & laminator sheets (optional)
Let’s Have Some FUN: Teaching Kids About Germs!
I’ll admit that my daughter and I (I’ll give her a little credit as we did brainstorm together) came up with this idea while we were reading See Inside Germs. We got to the last page to talk about how the body fights off germs with white blood cells, the gears in my brain started turning! I am a HUGE science girl, and LOVE to make fun activities to make understanding complex parts of science easier. While reading our book, I was teaching my daughter about how germs can be covered in antigens, which white blood cells use to create antibodies. The antigens and antibodies have to match like a puzzle piece in order for the white blood cells to stop the germs from making us sick.
I created a fun printable to work on matching shapes, and also emphasize the point that specific white blood cells will attack specific germs! They have to make the right antibodies to be successful! Grab your free printable here if you haven’t yet and then join us!
Start by letting your kids (if they are good with scissors) cut out the white blood cells. Leave them white to emphasize their name. I let my kids go crazy coloring in the germ cells, and then cut them out after. I also had them cut out the antibodies and antigens.
Next up is gluing! Let them grab a glue stick, and attach the antibodies to the white blood cell arms, and the antigens to the germ cells. Make sure you don’t get them mixed up!
Lastly you can work on matching the white blood cell to it’s specific germ. Notice that they fit together like a lock and key, which is exactly how it works in our body!
Let’s Read Our Germ Books!
I just LOVE when books have practical applications, don’t you? Germs are the hot topic in our house right now. Mainly it is, “MOM WHEN ARE THE GERMS GOING AWAY?!?!” I’ve taken this as an opportunity to teach them all about germs, and what we can do to stay healthy!
What Are Germs is great early flap book to answer ALL the questions kids have. It’s smaller sized for little hands, and has big flaps to make it more durable for toddlers and preschoolers.
Simple and easy to understand language to explain what germs are and how they make you sick, where they live, how they spread, and how your body can fight them!
We thought that What Are Germs was the perfect book for our hand washing activity! We talked about how washing your hands with soap and water is the best way to stop germs, and learned a few other great tips to stop them too!
For older kids (6-7+), or younger kids with supervision, this is an amazing resource filled with TONS of flaps, facts and information. See Inside Germs dives a little deeper into the world of germs!
See Inside Germs goes in depth into different types of microbes (COVID-19 even made the virus list!), and explains how diseases can easily spread from person to person. Reading about our body’s natural defense system was what inspired our antigen and antibody matching art project!
Thanks so much for joining us on our journey to learn more about germs! I hope this helps your kids to develop better hand washing hygiene and understand the reasoning behind why we do it! Luckily we now know how our body’s white blood cells take care of the job to kill a virus that we don’t wash away! If you’re working on reading these books while you’re home sick with a bug you caught, check out some fun board games to keep you entertained while you’re recovering! Happy Reading!
Leave a Reply