A Teacher Did an Experiment to Show the Power of Handwashing, and You Can’t Stay Unimpressed

Sometimes a prime example is better than words — especially when it comes to explaining something to children. That’s exactly what Jaralee Metcalf, a teacher from Idaho, decided to do to show her pupils the importance of washing their hands properly. And now the whole world is following her example!

To explain how bacteria spread and why it’s important to wash your hands well and often, Jaralee came up with a simple classroom activity with her students: she asked several kids with various levels of hand cleanliness to touch 5 pieces of white bread that were taken from the same loaf, at the same time. Then, they put the bread in individual plastic bags to observe what would happen over the course of one month.

Steps of the project

One interesting thing is that specimen #5 — the “hand sanitizer” slice — turned out to have a lot of bacteria too. So this is a clear example that hand sanitizer can’t replace proper hand-washing with soap. Jaralee shared the results of the project on Facebook to tell parents to teach their kids to wash their hands well and this simple project immediately spread to hundreds of other schools and families.

The hand sanitizer slice shook us a little! How about you? How do you teach your kids that they need to wash their hands properly?

A slice wiped on laptops

One month later the Chromebook-rubbed slice looked worse than all the other specimens. As the teacher explains, at their school they do sanitize the laptops, obviously, they didn’t do that for the project.

Common sources for the virus spread are doorknobs, keyboards, ATM keypads, and computer mice