This Life Hack for Getting Kids to Wash Their Hands Is as Gross as It Is Brilliant

ByElizabeth Licata

Science is awesome! It’s also pretty gross sometimes. But nothing is grosser than little kids. Any parent or teacher knows the struggle of trying to get a kid to wash their hands. Now one teacher has come up with a cool, gross science experiment that is fascinating kids and also teaching them the importance of hand washing.

Donna Gill Allen is a teacher and school nurse at Cape Fear High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She was getting seriously grossed out by the number of students not washing their hands properly, and her solution was brilliant.

You have to see this gross, cool experiment on hand washing

Gill put three slices of bread in sealed plastic bags on the wall. One slice was bagged by a person wearing gloves. That’s the control group. The second slice was bagged by someone who had just washed her hands. The third slice was passed around the classroom so everyone touched it, then it was bagged.

Over time, the germs picked up by the passed-around bread made it moldy and gross. The other slices still looked like bread.

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“I did this while teaching about germs and how they spread,” she wrote. “You use three pieces of bread. You let all the kids see you put a piece of bread in a baggy with a glove on hence “controlled” then you wash your hands and put a piece of bread in a baggy for “clean” last but definitely not least you pass a piece of bread around and let every kid in class touch it then you put it in a baggy and label it dirty. Watch how the bread changes over time due to germs. It is so cool and a great way to teach the importance of hand washing.”

Phew, that’s gross! And Allen teaches at a high school, too! When I first saw that this was a science experiment to get kids to wash their hands, I thought it would be for smaller children. Maybe I just hoped high school students were washing their hands more often than this.

This lesson is completely brilliant. It’s been shared more than 71,000 times, and other teachers and parents say they’re going to use the idea with their own kids.

This trick to teach hand washing with some gross, moldy bread is as brilliant as it is disgusting. You’ll want to wash your hands after this.

Have you ever tried anything like this? Let us know in the comments.

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(Image: Facebook / Courtney Lee Simpson

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