Educating Other Students About The Importance of Washing Your Hands In Ellis Elementary School

We are second graders from Ellis Elementary in Ms. Serratos' classroom. We live in Denver and go to Denver Public Schools. We started our Earth Force project in November.

In first grade, we studied germs. There are many germs in the bathrooms, on the tables, on the whiteboards, on the door handles and on the chairs. There are germs everywhere. We wanted to put a holder with sanitizer in the cafeteria. We found out that this is a problem because if little kids put their fingers in their mouths they might eat the sanitizer and that is not safe. This year, in second grade, we decided to use the same problem and come up with a new solution. This year, we began by sending all the students in the school a survey asking them if they wash their hands or not and why. Most people said they do wash their hands after they use the bathroom and before they eat. We know that our class’s surveys said that we all wash our hands before we eat and after we use the bathroom. We know this is not true because sometimes people go to the bathroom and they come back in less than a minute. They cannot use the bathroom and wash their hands in that time. We know that in our class no one asks to use the bathroom before lunch so we are not really washing hands before eating. We think the students don’t want to say that they don’t wash their hands because they are embarrassed. We decided to put posters up to remind the kids that they should wash their hands. We wrote three rhymes in our classroom as a whole group.

These rhymes say:

• Don’t get sick. Wash your hands real quick.
• Wash your hands always. And don’t touch anything in the hallways.
• Get rid of germs today. You’ll live a healthy way.

We used “Kid Pix” in the computer lab to make the posters. We added lots of different pictures to our posters. Then, we put the posters in the bathrooms to remind everyone to wash their hands. Thank you, Liz, for helping us doing lots of group activities and for laminating the posters for us.