Nursery Talk with Justine Barton

After receiving an email from a local nursery in Portsmouth asking if I could provide a dental talk for the children.  I responded yes of course, I was lucky enough to be joined by two dental hygiene students from the University of Portsmouth Dental Academy, who volunteered to give up their spare time and help out, they were invaluable during the talk with the children.

We talked to two different age groups of children at the nursery, communicating at their level key messages of:

We communicated this using simple card board cut out pictures of the dentist, dental nurse, dental chair, dental light and instrument tray. Then had fun interacting with the children giving them gloves and masks to try on and plastic mirrors to check and count the number of teeth they had.

We had lots of fun using a large card board cut out of a mouth with nice clean teeth, then asked the children to come forward and attach "Jimmy germs" onto the teeth, showing the children by the end of the day all the germs covering the nice clean teeth.

Then the children took turns to use a large toothbrush to "brush off"  the "Jimmy Germs",  when they had brushed all the germs off they all clapped as the teeth were nice and clean again.

We asked the children to choose which food and drinks  they thought were good and bad for the teeth, they choose food items and put the into two different baskets  one with a happy tooth and one with a sad tooth with a cavity.  

We had lots of different tooth brushing models from sharks to dragons with teeth, the children really enjoyed this as we showed them all the different sides of the teeth which needed to be brushed and we practised for two minutes using a toothbrush timer, reminding the children to spit and not rinse after brushing.  It was good to learn that most of the older children were not rinsing after brushing.

The children chose from a variety of dental story books, Dora the Explorer Visits The Dentist was a favourite and of course all choose a sticker at the end of the talk.

It was a very enjoyable and rewarding morning talking to the children and the students gained a good insight in communicating good oral health messages across to young children in a very simple way.

I would like to say a special thank you to TePe for supporting the nursery talk providing all the nursery children with a new TePe toothbrush and samples of TePe toothpaste.

Written by Justine Barton