Children's Dental Games

Dentist Play

• Children enjoy pretending to work in several professions, especially medicine and dentistry. Provide them with an old white men&'s shirt or a white smock, some small mirrors, toothbrushes, toothpicks and an outdoor lounge chair. Kids can then take turns playing dentist and patient. Make sure that children know not to actually put the tools into each other&'s mouths, unless they each have their own toothbrushes and other materials.

Sorting Foods

• It is important for kids to understand which foods are good for their teeth, and which foods to avoid. Cut out a large white tooth and a large yellow tooth from cardboard. Then give kids magazines that include pictures of different foods and let them cut out some of their favorites. Kids can then glue pictures of foods that are good for their teeth (e.g., apples, carrots, milk) to the white tooth, and pictures of foods that are bad for their teeth (e.g., gummy worms, cotton candy, soda) to the yellow tooth. Talk about the importance of eating lots of the foods on the white tooth and brushing their teeth after eating the foods on the yellow tooth.

This is the Way We Brush Our Teeth

• Many kids love singing songs, and it&'s an engaging way to help younger ones learn about tooth brushing. Sing a song such as "This is the way we brush our teeth...so early in the morning" to the tune of "Here We Go &'Round the Mulberry Bush." Then show kids how to hum the song while "brushing" their teeth with a finger. Encourage them to see if they can "brush" the fronts, backs, tops and sides of all their teeth while they are humming the song. Tell them they can hum the song more than once if they need to; the main point is to clean their teeth from all angles.