Good hygiene

To finish our topic on the body, following on from healthy eating and exercise, I decided to focus a little on the importance of good hygiene.

We found this amazing book at the local charity shop: I Know How We Fight Germs. It explains the processes in really simple language via a conversation between a little boy and his mum. I really like how it's done - especially as it differentiates between bacterial and viral infections by explaining the different mechanisms different white blood cells use, but without going into too much detail. I wish I'd read it during my Biochemistry degree actually! 😂 Can't recommend it enough if you have an interest in this area. 👍

We watched a couple of videos on YouTube of white blood cells eating bacteria and talked a bit about it...

The timing worked out that this was shared on one of the HE Facebook groups just as we started this topic. 😀 So we signed up to it and went along... It was a great introduction to clinical trials and drug testing! And the girls each received a certificate for taking part:

While at Thinktank, we visited the area dedicated to medicine. A lot of it was too difficult for them, but this game was really good! They had to stop the bacteria or viruses from invading the body by choosing the appropriate defender (e.g. cytokine, T-cell, etc.)

They also had a little display on immunisations, which we've discussed every time before they've needed one (i.e. some germs can make us really seriously ill - remember last time you had a cold or a fever? They can make you feel even worse than that! 100x worse! - so we have injections to put a tiny tiny bit of that germ in our body. Just enough for our body to know it's there and fight it away. So if a real big one of those germs ever gets into our body in the future, our body will remember, "I've fought this germ before!" and will be able to kill the big germ really quickly, so we don't get really ill from it. If we don't have an injection and the big germ gets in, our body won't know what to do and won't be that good at fighting it, so we'd get seriously ill. That's why injections are important. Would you rather have a small injection and be safe or get very very ill? ...The girls always chose the injection. 😂) so we had a quick recap on that too.

When home, we read through the corresponding Science books on hygiene from the ones we have and linked this all to our earlier work on Al-Qudduus.

No worksheets this time round, just lots of practical activities, reading and discussions. 😄