Sep 03 2009
Practical Life v. H1N1
As most schools are doing, we are making adjustments and preparations for the predicted mass outbreak of the swine flu this fall. Unfortunately, I feel like some of these preparations are going to drastically reduce the effectiveness of our Montessori curriculum. (And I will welcome any suggestions for activity substitutions, because I haven’t yet come up with any!)
We are, unfortunately, currently located in an old Catholic school building. Only one of the classrooms is fortunate enough to have running water in a sink. The rest of us are forced to either send children down the hallway (my girls go around the corner) to the bathroom, or to wash hands the old-fashioned way in a bowl.
To keep my children in the classroom as much as possible, I encourage my children to use the “handwashing station” any time they need to wash their hands. They put a pitcher of warm water (from the thermal container) into the bowl, scrub their hands with soap, rinse in the water, then empty the dirty water into a bucket of waste water.
Children know to wash their hands every time they want to eat snack or do a food prep activity, any time their hands get dirty while doing a work, or if they become somehow unsanitary from typical kids picking at….well…you know….And my children are pretty well-trained in this aspect.
Snack and food prep are also very big in my classroom. Along with that comes washing dishes. So many skills are acquired through these processes, that these activities have become the crux of my Practical Life curriculum.
The children also use cloth towels (to cut back on paper waste), and they enjoy washing them on the washing board. (They are laundered by parent volunteers each week.)
Due to concerns about the H1N1 virus, we are being asked to use solely paper products, and to eliminate the handwashing station from our classroom. I have to admit that I am not comfortable sending my little ones out of the classroom to wash their hands that frequently. I don’t like to use that much hand sanitizer (because it doesn’t actually wash your hands, though it kills the germs). And I have a strong conviction that if we don’t teach the children hygiene skills, how can they prepare themselves for handling sickness?
One activity that we have all decided to implement is washing dishes that are not used for actual eating, so that they can learn the process. But I haven’t yet figured out how to teach the handwashing, without having to sanitize the bowl every single time it is used. My assistant can’t quite stand over the bowl to wipe it out every time it is used (like 40+ times per day), and I’m not about to let the children use Lysol wipes. (Not to mention those are not OSHA-approved). I still have a few days to figure it all out….
How are you having to change your methods in anticipation of the H1N1 outbreak scare?
Unfortunately people will get sick regardless of the amount of sterile precautions we are told to take. Sometimes it can be to our detriment to be too sterile.
I used to work in a school environment. There is always going to be the one who has no concern for the health of others(either the child or the parent who sends them to school sick), goes to work or school germy sick and sneezes everywhere, never washes their hands, always touching everything with germy residue on their hands and face.
It takes a sense of responsibility in all of us to be concerned enough to check yourself before giving it to someone else. That starts with you and the other’s in that person’s life who are teachers. Sounds to me like you do a pretty good job in that responsibility by not making them walk down a hall where all the other germy kids went to wash their hands. I cannot see where you can do better than that.