As we start our day in school we always wash our hands as part of our daily hygiene routine. We carried out an experiment by washing our hands before we entered our classroom, then used a disclosing cream which highlights areas that have a high concentration of germs. We carefully checked over our hands using UV light torches and this sparked a fantastic discussion on what areas collected bacteria most and the possible reasons why.

The children then decided that the best course of action would be to wash their hands repeatedly and check them to see how long it took for these to show less ‘germs’. We recorded how many hand washes it took to achieve this and then through further discussion realised that washing your hands is very important but doing it this frequently was impractical and could harm our skin.

It became apparent to us that the quality of our hand washing and targeting areas we knew bacteria liked to gather, was the smarter and most effective way to wash our hands and maximize our hygiene.

We then used our experience and discussion points to write a set of instructions on ‘How to Wash Our Hands Well’, as part of our functional writing lesson that week. The children loved this lesson, as they were able to create important self knowledge and practice of personal hygiene, but also understanding how to do this without harming their overall health and wellbeing.