Children are constantly taking in everything that happens around them, and the recent world medical pandemic is no exception. We’ve heard lots of questions this week about getting sick and how to stay healthy. We took the opportunity to teach our children the real importance of washing our hands, using hand sanitiser and ensuring spaces around us are clean.

We encourage our children to wash their hands regularly throughout their time at OSHC including before and after eating. This week we planned some activities to provide our children an understanding of why we ask them to wash their hands so often. What better way to teach the children then to show them living proof through a stomach-churning experiment involving mouldy bread.

We had a fantastic engaging conversations with the children about why we wash our hands. While having our discussion about germs being invisible we passed around a piece of plain white bread. We asked the children what they thought may happen to the bread over time. We heard lots of creative ideas such as “The bread will go black” & “It will go stinky”

Miss Maddi took some of our students to learn how to correctly wash their hands, ensuring they counted to 20 while they scrubbed. The children then touched a fresh slice of bread. We placed the slices of bread in separate bags to see what would happen and if there would be much difference between slices.

We also wiped slices of bread on the bathroom sink, on door handles, over the Lego table and the rubbish bins. The aim of this experiment is to show the children just how many germs can be on surfaces even through we can’t see them with our eyes.

As a service we are committed to teaching the children the importance of safe hygiene practices. We have emailed all families with details of how our service is managing the evolving situation, and encourage families to ask questions should they have any.