Making Every School Year Successful

Staying healthy

Keeping Kids Healthy during the School Year
Another sure-fire way to make the school year better is to teach Alex and Ollie how to battle with germs, not with each other. The following bacteria-fighting tips particularly help primary graders understand how infection spreads and provide some simple but effective ways to avoid becoming sick. They will make the whole family feel better.

A Germ-Revealing Activity

• Show Junior that germs are spread by touching. Hand-to-nose transfer is the most common way to get a cold. To bring the lesson home in a real and visual way, you will need a small amount of flour poured into a plastic bag and some old magazines. This makes a minor mess, so do it in the kitchen, wearing old clothes. Have Junior wet his hands, then dip them lightly in the flour. Dip yours, too. Next, purposely ignoring your flour-coated hands, open the magazines and find advertisements for cold, flu, and pain medication. Discuss typical symptoms like fever, shivering, aches, coughs, and sneezing. Now reveal the flour mystery – tell him that the flour on his hands represents germs. Track where the flour has spread. Is any on his nose, mouth, or ears? Or on yours? Talk about how it got there and what would happen if the flour were really germs and he put his hands in his mouth.

• Show Junior how to wash germs away. Rhinovirus, the nasty culprit that causes the common cold, can survive for hours on objects and surfaces like pencils, books, tables, and playground equipment, so teach Junior to wash his hands often throughout his day. While your hands are still covered with flour from the above activity, spray them with cooking oil spray. Then move over to the sink together and wash your hands. Count aloud to time how long it takes to get all the flour and oil off your hands. (It should ideally take a count of 15-20.) Remind him to wash his cuticles and the backs of his hands. Tell Junior that since real germs hang tough on the hands, too, he should use the same count to kill them whenever he washes his hands at home, school, the movies, a restaurant, or a friend's house.

• Show Junior that germs are spread by coughing and sneezing. You will need a spray bottle with a strong spray and some black construction paper. Tell him how fast germs spread – sneezes travel at 75-100 miles per hour and coughs at 300 miles per hour! Then demonstrate. Fill a bottle with water (the "germs"), and have Junior hold it next to his mouth, nozzle pointing forward, away from his head. Now, hold up a piece of construction paper about six inches from the spray bottle, and have Junior spray water onto the paper. Are there any "germs" on the paper? Step backwards at one foot intervals to gauge the power of each spray. Ask Junior what would happen if the water were really germs and the paper your face. What might happen if you swallowed some? Review how touching, coughing, and sneezing spread germs that make people sick.

Germ-Halting Tips For Primary Graders

• Show Junior how to catch the culprits. Show Junior how to use his elbow to catch his cough or sneeze if a tissue is nowhere to be found. Since he can't easily touch anyone with his elbow, he's less likely to spread germs.

• Show Junior the bathroom is not a playground. Teach him that this is a place for important, private business. Show him how to properly and hygienically use urinals and toilets. And how to wash hands and properly dispose of towels at the end of every trip to a rest room.

• Show Junior how to touch and go. Encourage Junior to use his knuckle or his elbow to press an elevator button or the push bar on a door. Or use his hip, his bottom, or his sneaker, especially when he's just spent twenty seconds washing the germs off his hands.

• Show consideration for others. Out of respect for his teachers, tutors, and classmates, keep Junior at home when he has a cold or other upper respiratory or sinus infection that causes excessive coughing, sneezing, or dripping. When he is well enough to go back to school, place small tissue packets and disposable wipes in his pockets, lunch box, and backpack, and remind him to keep his hands to himself.