Totally Teeth!!

In science, we've been learning about teeth and ways to keep them healthy. First, we talked about the different types of teeth and their jobs. We "practiced" using each kind of tooth when eating a snack to see how each kind helped us chew our food.

Today we did a worksheet where you cut out the types of teeth and glue them to the correct spot in the "'mouth". They learned about incisors, canines and molars and that they have 20 teeth now but could have up to 32 as an adult!
Then we played a fun game I found in one of my idea books. To set up, you use red playdoh (I would have used pink but our pink playdoh was dried out) to make the "gums" and use white unifix cubes for the teeth. Then they took turns drawing index cards that I made with healthy and unhealthy things that we can do for our teeth like brush teeth 3 times a day, eat sugary snacks, go to the dentist, forget to floss, etc. If you draw an "unhealthy" card, you have to replace a white cube with a black one to represent a cavity! But don't worry, there is a "great checkup!" card and if you draw this card, you get to replace all your cavities with white teeth again! We played the game for about 10-15 minutes (I only had about 20 index cards and just reshuffled them) and whoever had the most white teeth at the end of the game, wins! The kids liked this game alot and I think they actually liked when they'd get a cavity! LOL! They also played with the "mouth" and pretended to lose teeth. It was fun.
Some other ideas I found (and might do later) were:
--Egg carton flossing- use a clean egg carton flipped over and use real floss to practice flossing between the "teeth".
--Egg brushing- Soak one hardboiled egg in pop (cola) and one egg in milk overnight (in the fridge) and see how the pop stained the egg and the milk made it whiter. Then use a toothbrush to brush the stain off the tooth.