Pages

Sunday 6 March 2016

"Is there bacteria on hands?"

"Is there bacteria on hands?"

Was the shocked exclamation when I mentioned why we wash our hands before meals... after several of the children had been involved in some serious nasal exploration...

So I set up an experiment... one slice of bread that all the children got to handle without washing their hands... and then a control slice that I put in a sealed bag after the children saw me wash and disinfect my hands and also touching the bread as little as possible...

The bags were marked "with hands" and  "without hands" - and taped to the window. Of course with it being winter the window was acting as a fridge... so nothing much was happening... so I moved them to another window (internal one) so that the chill facter would ceaseto slow things down... it then took 24 hrs for mould to appear on the handled bread...


Not much... but enough to see the difference...

I guess now with a weekend allowing the bread to feed the mould that there should be quite some development on both breads...

We also looked at images of bacteria and virus under the microscope... choosing ones that the children had succombed to recently like tummy bugs, colds and ear infections...
We talked about how the white blood cells were heroes and were fighting off the virus/bacteria and that fever, and pain were all part of the battle to get rid of the virus/bacteria that did not belong there...

It was an interesting dialogue that had all the children totally fascinated... me too!

UPDATE: Monday 7th March

No comments:

Post a Comment