National Smile Month: Teaching them about Oral Health

Some days brushing teeth is painless and everyone cooperates happily, other days it’s a battle. We use a few silly tricks to encourage nice wide mouths which you can read about here. Although, I will warn you, you will need to be prepared to make a fool of yourself. I’m pretty sure we all signed up for that at birth though.

National Smile Month

As this month, from the 13th May – 13th June, is National Smile month, I’ve decided to try and teach my girls a little more about oral health and why it’s so important to brush our teeth and look after them.

I really like to use short YouTube videos as a starting point and then discuss whatever interests or confuses them. On Pinterest, I found someone had already compiled a list of seven child friendly clips so that saved me some searching time.

Magic Mummy Powers

As we brush teeth, I often pretend I can see everything they’ve eaten that day. I explain which foods I’m brushing away. I especially make a big deal of this when I know they’ve had more sugary foods than normal.

To continue with the teeth theme this week we also did some dental related activities:

1) Book:

We reread Alan’s Big Scary Teeth by Jarvis. This was one of our free books from the Book Trust but we hadn’t read it for a while. Alan the alligator’s teeth are actually a set of dentures. This is a secret he keeps from the rest of the animals. I asked the girls how they think Alan lost his real teeth. We talked about how some foods aren’t very good for teeth and can cause them to decay/go bad.

2) Game:

We counted how many teeth the girls had and then made a mouth with this many circles. Each circle had a mini marshmallow on as the teeth. With a dice, they took it in turns to roll and gobble up that many marshmallows (I know marshmallows are sugary but I just choose to ignore this fact). The winner was the one who lost all her healthy milk teeth first.

3) Craft:

I can’t resist a little painting especially with my new splash mat from @MessyMe and so I gave them both an outline of a tooth, some white paint and some cheap toothbrushes from the pound shop.

Do your little ones happily let you brush your teeth? If you have any more tips for making teeth brushing fun, let me know in the comments.

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