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GB and I decided that his New Year’s Resolution for this year should be to be a better tooth brusher. He has pretty bad habits in that area that we are determined to kick.

The first thing we did was watch this cute video together: Dr. Rabbit and The Legend of Tooth Kingdom.

Here are some great animations from the ADA site.

We learned about brushing, flossing and rinsing by using this downloadable teacher’s guide from Proctor and Gamble.

There were lots of fun ‘tooth brushing’ games here.

We did this science experiment:

Two apples to represent your child’s precious teeth.

Take a pencil and poke a hole in one apple. This will represent an untreated cavity.

After 24 hours we cut open each apple. The one with the cavity had obviously started to rot.

And the control apple showed no signs of rot, because it had NO cavity.

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We started this next experiment four days ago. It’s a very easy experiment, but it just takes some time to accomplish anything.

Take one egg from the fridge. Mark one side with a permanent marker.

You will need the egg, a small dish, and some toothpaste with fluoride cavity protection.

Squeeze the toothpaste into the small dish.

Then immerse the egg, marked side down, into the toothpaste so that it is halfway submerged. Leave it for four days. This will allow the fluoride to penetrate the egg shell and help protect it for the next phase of the experiment.

Plaque is an acid. So in this experiment the vinegar will represent the plaque. After gently washing the toothpaste off of the egg, we gently submerged the egg in a cup of vinegar.

Immediately we could see bubbles forming on the unmarked side of the egg. The plaque (acid) was obviously attacking the tooth (egg).

Leave the egg in the vinegar for 7-12 hours. Start checking after about seven hours. As you can see from the above photo, the ‘plaque’ really weakened the ‘tooth.’ The shell on the egg was extremely soft and you could easily push your finger in on the unmarked side. The marked side was much harder. And you could really see the benefits of the toothpaste. We left our egg in the vinegar for 10 hours.

I’m hoping that this experiment will reinforce the reasons behind brushing, and the fact that you must be diligent in the care of your teeth. It was a great visual for GB… and me, too! I was shocked at the difference.