A healthy mind resides in a healthy body, but how do you keep your body healthy? The answer to this question is simple: by sustaining personal hygiene. Adults habitually know by their experiences about what they should and should not do in order to live a hygienic life through hygiene monitoring. Biovigil’s system offers hand washing and hygiene compliance monitoring to hospitals. Kids, on the other hand, demand proper guidance and have to be told the procedures involved in personal hygiene monitoring due to the high risks associated with health problems due to non-hygienic activities.
Of course, we cannot just explain it directly to them due to their maturity level; instead, we can exemplify through some everyday specimens.
According to a study in Europe, the most effective way to influence a child’s mind is through games.
That said, let us have a look at a list of games which may develop a conscience about personal hygiene among children.
A normal kid, on average, washes his hands for just about 10 seconds, maybe even less. They are all fast geeks after all. However, according to scientists, for proper removal of germs, it is recommended that hands must be washed with antibacterial soap for more than 30 seconds.
For this, you can use glitters and put them on your kid’s hand and challenge him to wash them off while imagining them as germs. Glitter is a sticky substance, and it will take more than 30 seconds to wash it off by scrubbing. This way, you will be able to tell your kid a perfect handwashing technique and its concept.
Make some images on a few cards with diverse personal hygiene tools like a toothbrush, soap, nail cutter, shampoo, etc. Now, take another set of cards and brand pictures about the applications of these tools like a toothbrush for teeth, and so on.
Mix the sets and have your kid match the cards based on their respective use. You can put a reward upon the successful combination of cards so your kids will enjoy playing it and learn from it by paying more attention in the hopes of winning.
The IF games
These are games that involved conditions and will show the risks that may happen if personal hygiene is not maintained. Take 10 pieces of paper and write down phrases like “If you don’t brush” and on another piece of paper write “your teeth will hurt.”
Make other sentence fragments like these separated on different pieces and let your kid match them. Once the matching is finished, your kid will know what would happen if he does not follow proper hygiene.
To illustrate the process of germ spreading through touching objects, use paint. Put some paint on your hands and palms after pretending to do something non-hygienic like coming out of a toilet without washing your hands or sneezing on your hands and touching random places in your surroundings. The paint on that area would indicate that your hand touched that place. Showing that the germs on your hands are now in your surrounding wherever you touched your hands will allow your kids to understand that germs will spread if they don’t maintain proper hygiene.