Tennille Needham snaps on her latex gloves and thrusts her hands in a jumbo jar of Cheese Whiz, lathering it on like lotion.
“Pretend my hands are your teeth and the Cheese Whiz is sneaky germs,” she says to a Grade 1 class at J.J. Nearing Catholic Elementary School Monday afternoon.
One boy from the class is armed with a washcloth and eagerly rubs the cheese product off her hands in big circles, the same technique children are taught to use a toothbrush to brush their teeth.
Needham, a dental hygienist from Spruce Grove, is touring schools in St. Albert with a half-hour presentation on the importance of dental hygiene and oral health.
“Tooth decay is the most common chronic childhood illness,” says Needham. “People don’t think of your mouth as affecting your whole health … they need to be educated.”
Not enough dental health education is done in schools or at home, she says. Teaching kids proper oral hygiene is especially important when they reach school age as they are learning to brush and floss independently.
During the classroom presentation, Needham shows the Grade 1 students proper brushing technique on an oversized mouth model. She reminds them how much toothpaste they should squeeze onto their brush and that they should be brushing twice a day for two minutes each time.
“Every day we get bugs that live in our mouth,” she says, relating plaque to aquarium algae. “It forms kind of a fuzzy coating on your teeth. Just like we have germs on our hands, we have 600 kinds of germs that live in our mouth.”
Using mammoth-sized dental instruments, she shows the six-year-olds how a hygienist uses a mirror and explorer or “tooth tickler” to check for cavities, also known as “sugar bug holes.”
Needham hopes the presentations will help children prepare for their first dentist appointment or familiarize them with what happens during one – from the cleaning, to x-rays to sealant treatments on their molars, to prevent cavities.
“It’s another way to communicate dental hygiene outside of the dentist’s office and bring the dentist into the community,” she says.
J.J. Nearing and Neil M. Ross are two of 35 schools in the Capital Region Needham plans on visiting this year.
In St. Albert, she is sponsored by Dr. Robbie Gill of McKenney Corner Dental Care. For the last six years, she has been visiting schools as a volunteer.
“I just want to reach more and more kids,” she says.
