Don't Forget to Brush Your Teeth, Kindergarten!

This adorable lesson is one I'd forgotten about.  I was at a conference (don't most of my lessons/posts/ideas start out this way?!) and saw another teacher's lesson where she had young children draw very large, I just added the hand and toothbrush.

We started out looking at ourselves in mirrors and drew with pencil.  We made our "brushing our teeth" face and tried to look closely at all our teeth (or the spaces where our teeth were before they fell out).  After drawing, students traced with Sharpie and colored with crayon, trying to make the best, most realistic colors they could.  

Next we chose construction paper the closest to our skin color (I'd cut them to a 6" x 9" size).  Using pencil, students traced ONE of their hands and cut them out.  Then they glued them hanging loose from their papers:

This is a super-strange shot of hands glued
(each paper has ONE hand glued hanging down,
though it totally doesn't look like it here).

Finally, I led them through making a toothbrush.  Students chose one color of 9" x 12" construction paper, folded it long and skinny, glued it and folded it skinnier and glued it.  To make the toothbrush handle, I had them hold their hand at one end and draw two little lines to cut on.  They folded the handle part in thirds (and glued it) leaving a larger "head" for the bristles:

This one's a little too big, but you get the idea.

We used paper straws for the bristles, cutting them (and watching them jump all over the place), folding little "baby feet" and gluing them on:

The hardest part of the whole thing was figuring how to glue the toothbrush on the hand in a realistic way.

Ideally, the toothbrushes are left a little loose so we can brush our teeth by moving it back and forth and saying "I'm brushing my teeth! I'm brushing my teeth!"

While this is a great lesson for talking about oral hygiene, I did tell my kindergartners they can't brush their paper teeth and tell Mom or Dad "yes, I did brush my teeth!"