Personal hygiene.

Personal hygiene are practices that serve to promote and preserve ones own maintance of health, a child is unable to do this and it is necessary in a child’s learning environment that he/she is aware of hygiene and their very own hygiene routines. A child must explore and understand these. They need to know why they need to wash their hands and why they have to have a wash and brush their teeth everyday.

The Task

My task is to promote personal hygiene in my placement setting, my placement is in a nursery and the age range is three to four year olds.

My Aims and Objectives

I aim to promote personal hygiene to all of the children in a fun way that they can relate to.

Method

I plan to make up a Hairy Hat Mans Hygiene bag (a letterland character). Within the bag will be a number of items that can be shown to the morning session at the nursery and then the afternoon session, I will make it a class discussion with the children and write down any comments that are made by any of them.

So what will be in my Hairy Hat Man’s Hygiene Bag?

Golden Girls Green Hair Brush
Oscar Orange’s Orange Hair Brush
Robin Red’s Red Hair Comb
Naughty Nick’s Nail Brush
Sammy Snakes Soap
Fireman Fred’s Flannel
Bouncy Ben’s Blue Toothbrush
Wicked Witches White Toothpaste
Clever Cats Cloth
Clever Cats Cotton Buds
Edie Elephants Eczema Cream

I will ask a child who is sitting nicely to come up and choose something out of ‘Hairy Hatmans Hygiene Bag’ I will make emphasis on the sound ‘h’. Once they have chosen something I will tell them what it is then I will ask them what sound each makes i.e. this is Golden Girls Green Hair Brush what sound does Golden Girl make? ‘ggg’ should be my reply, I will then ask them to point at golden girl on the letterland wall as I plan to do this discussion in the letterland bay.

I will then pass ...

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I will then pass it around the group and ask them why it is important to brush their hair. I will do this for every item and explain about every single one and why it is important and how we use it. When I get the soap and cloth out I will explain about how important it is to wash our hands when we finish on the toilet, I shall let them know then that they will be producing wash your hands posters after we have finished our discussion.

Once all the items have been passed around I will ask one of the children to place each back in my bag and as she/he does it I will get the class to count altogether 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, then I will take one away and ask them how many are left etc. Then I will teach them a song that I have produced:

‘Wash Your Hands Song’

Wischy washy wash your hands, wash your hands, wash your hands.

Wischy washy wash your hands, wash your hands.

Put them in the sink, sink, put them in the sink use water and soap,

Mix them together, together, mix them together and rinse the germs away.

Wischy washy wash your hands now lets dry them.

The children can then sing this song whilst they are producing their posters. The posters will have handprints all over them they can rub their hands together to make multi – coloured hand prints, these will then be placed above the sinks on a display board with the song placed all across it in bright encouraging colours.

Evaluation

In the morning before the children came in I set up the paper and paints for the posters, and also backed the display wall in an orange colour, as the paints for the handprints were blue and yellow. I placed my Hairyhat Mans Hygiene Bag in the bay, and welcomed them all in (along with the staff). Once they had all took the coats off and sat down, I did the register and said prayers. After this I started ‘ who knows what hygiene is?’ No one replied (I didn’t expect them to) so I explained that it was something that we all must do to stay clean and beautiful looking, after a little discussion I showed them my bag. I made it really fun and went through each one making emphasis on the letterland character and the sound that they made, they knew every single sound and letterland character that I mentioned. I then passed the item around so that the children could feel the texture and explore using their senses.

After this we counted them back in to the bag and I took one away and asked them how many were left etc.

The children were looking excited and were more interested than I expected, they loved the fact that I had included letterland characters because it was something that they could relate to. I ended up making up a pretend story about Sammy Snake and the Soap and why it is important to wash our hands, which they found hilarious as I mentioned Sammy falling and slipping everywhere because of the soap suds that Hairyhat Man had left …… and so on.

To learn them the song I read it and then went over each sentence slowly they picked it up really quickly and in no time they were actions involved and the children were jumping around.

I then showed the children a picture of my handprints that I had produced and told them that they were going to do one. So I took eight at a time and we produced some great hand- prints, we even sang the ‘Wash Your Hands’ song whilst we were painting. I chose to do hand- printing because the children would have to wash their hands and we would have to wash the table with a cloth afterwards.

I did the same thing again for the afternoon children and they found it just as exciting.

The discussions went well and I felt that the children and gained a lot of knowledge about the discussed topic, the conversations that the children came out with were generally what they do at home concerning their hygiene. I found that this activity went really well in fact better than what I expected. I left the Hairyhat Mans Hygiene bag out so that the children could look at the items if they wanted to. Once all the hand-prints had been done myself and one of the staff members cut them all out and stapled them to the allocated display wall and I wrote out the ‘Wash Your Hands’ song on a poster and placed it in the middle, the children were thrilled to see their work and I feel that the display reminds and prompts them to wash their hands after they have used the toilet.

Learning Outcomes for the Children

The children gained a wide understanding of keeping clean and hygienic, they learnt literacy skills with the letterland letters and also numeric skills with the counting. They explored using their senses and learned creative skills (their hand print pictures) and social skills (our discussion and song).