Introduction
When it comes to teaching small children food safety rules, it can be a bit difficult to find ways to say things that they’ll understand. For example, as adults, we know that unsafe handling of food is responsible for any number of foodborne illnesses but try putting that into language a preschool child can understand! Perhaps the best thing to do is to ask them questions as you go along to see if they understood what you meant rather than what they heard with a limited child’s vocabulary. Let’s see what we can do to make those food safety lessons simple and fun enough that they will want to learn.
Make Learning Fun
For most families, food safety lessons start the moment you begin teaching them how to wash their hands properly. As an adult, you know that this means scrubbing under warm water and soap for at least 20 seconds can yield the best results. However, as a means of making it fun for kids who mostly can’t count to 20 just yet, we’ve taught them to sing Happy Birthday while they scrub with your favourite brand of baby soap. In fact, some savvy manufacturers have also made colourful soaps that kids will have fun using. Since handwashing is the very first step in food safety, it pays to make it fun for them, and something they will want to do as often as possible.
Lessons on Germs and Pests
Most little children are inherently afraid of bugs, so that’s something you can use to demonstrate how bugs make food dirty. You might also let them see the Bristol pest control person who comes to do regular spraying to keep bugs at bay. Then there are rodents to be worried about. Sadly, kids tend to think mice and rats are cute, so you have your work cut out for you there. There are probably lessons online that you could use and when using a service like Advance Pest Control Bristol, you might ask them to talk to the kids about what it is they are doing.
Especially during the winter months when rodents find their way in and out of the cold, pest control might be a service you require more so than other times within the year. Germs are going to be a bit more difficult to explain since they are microscopic and unseen with the human eye, but again YouTube may be a good teaching resource here.
When to Give Rewards
Since you’ve contracted an expert pest control company, you will want to do everything in your power to work with them. This may mean giving your kids rewards for any of the things they’ve learned like scraping food from their plates into the trash bin and washing their hands properly before eating. Maybe you’ve taught them about how important it is to keep crumbs picked up so as not to attract rats.
You’ve explained why the pest controller comes to help you keep rats away and if they show you that they know what to do, you can give them a reward of some kind. It doesn’t need to be food! Reward them and make those lessons fun. You will see just how quickly they will show you what they’ve learned because they do want that reward after all, and that’s something you are more than happy to provide.
