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A teacher's effective lesson to encourage children to wash their hands

As the Coronavirus spreads on earth, and the authorities of the countries concerned by the presence of the virus remind their citizens of the basic hygiene instructions:wash your hands regularly (once an hour) or use a hydroalcoholic solution, cough or sneeze into the bend of your elbow, use single-use tissues; we saw fit to highlight this experience made by an American mistress in 2017.

To show how much dirt impacts an organism!

The teacher has indeed managed to demonstrate quite easily to her students why it is important to have the least clean before touching the food. Donna Gill Allen practicing in North Carolina, USA, has thus carried out a classroom experiment as “cool as it is disgusting” in her words, as part of a course on germs. To show her students how much dirt has an impact on an organism, she took four pieces of bread that she “treated” differently before locking them up for a month in individual transparent bags.

A lesson well learned

She thus placed there a piece manipulated by hands washed with soap; another by hands washed with hydroalcoholic solution; another was rubbed against the keyboard of a computer and finally a last one was touched by several students before being in turn placed as is in the bag. The latter - having then developed many germs - quickly became stale as evidenced by the greenish color on the crumb as you can see below. There is no doubt that such a vision has encouraged many children to no longer skip the hand cleaning stage before going to the table... Donna Gill Allen's initiative was at the time shared nearly 73,000 times on Facebook and had convinced many teachers (and parents!) to reproduce the experiment according to the satisfied comments left. A good point for the teacher!

Sample bread slice.

Slice of bread handled by soap-washed hands.

Slice of bread handled by hands washed with hydroalcoholic solution.


Slice of bread rubbed on a computer keyboard.

Slice of bread handled by unwashed hands.

There you go...