Why is it Important To Wash Our Hands?

Wednesday, September 02, 2015

Today is Wonder Wednesday, so we wanted to know, Why is it important to wash our hands? We discussed reasons why it's important to wash our hands. Many friends mentioned things like germs and sickness. We had a discussion about what germs are and how germs are spread. Many students said germs are spread by touching things without washing our hands. So, we decided to test it out for ourselves with an experiment.

Here is how we used 3 pieces of bread to find out why it is important to wash our hands.

First, we used our dirty, germy hands to touch one piece of bread.

We put that piece of bread in a baggie and labeled the baggie "Dirty Hands."

Then, we ALL washed our hands! (With soap AND water)

Then, we all touched another piece of bread with our CLEAN hands!

We took this piece of bread and put it into a baggie. We labeled the baggie "Clean Hands". We took the last piece of bread and put it into a baggie labeled "Control". I explained to our friends we need to know what the normal bread would look like when it's in a baggie as well, so we needed a "control" for our experiment.

The pieces of bread needed to be stored in a cool, dry place and I wanted to make sure everyone could see it, so we taped the baggies to the end of the cubbies.

Then, we used our Wonder Journals for the first time and we recorded our predictions for what would happen in our experiment. Some friends predicted the dirty hands bread would turn red, some predicted it would grow spots, and others predicted nothing would happen!