Healthy Habits: What Does Each Child Use?

Five children hang in picture frames along the top of this kindergarten page, and five everyday things stand on a shelf at the bottom: a sun hat, a bed, a toothbrush, a bar of soap and a comb. On the sheet shown one child stretches and yawns in striped pajamas under a moon and stars, one washes hands at a sink under the tap, one stands out in the bright sun, one has hair sticking up in every direction, and one brushes teeth with a mouth full of foam. The child draws a line from each to the thing that child uses. Every child gets exactly one thing, and nothing on the shelf is left over.

Healthy habits in kindergarten are about the small routines of the day: sleeping, washing hands, brushing teeth, combing hair and staying safe in the sun. Each child is shown in the middle of a habit, and matching the child to the thing puts the habit into words a five-year-old already uses. What is this child doing? Getting ready for bed. What does this child use? A bed. The page is about hygiene, rest and sun safety, not food, and it stays that way through the whole family.

One sheet, five lines, and no child hangs straight above its own thing on the shelf. The child in the sun is not wearing the hat yet, so talk about why a hat goes on before playing outside; the child with messy hair has a hand up at the head, and some children will call it scratching, but the comb is still the only thing that fits. This is the base page of the healthy habits family; its faces order the steps of hand washing, sort brushing teeth into before, during and after, stop germs, give reasons, and track habits across a week. In health education terms it supports the early grades goal of naming healthy behaviors.