Egg Carton Toothbrush Painting to Help Kids Learn About Oral Health

Teaching kids to take care of their teeth is an important life lesson. The habits they start now will continue with them for life. This important right from when they start to get their first baby teeth, but now that my eldest has just got his first permanent tooth I’ve been emphasising even more – these teeth are the only ones that you’re going to get.

It is so important to brush and clean them well and take the best care of them.

Last year I shared some fun ways to motivate children to clean their teeth. I was inspired by these to make a fun toothbrush painting activity so today I’m going to share another simple activity that my children enjoyed as a fun reminder of the importance of brushing teeth.

Supplies Needed for Egg Carton Toothbrush Painting

• Empty egg cartons or egg boxes
• Old toothbrushes
• White Paint (or toothpaste)
• Scissors

How to Set up Egg Carton Teeth Activity for Young Kids

We used some spare egg cartons to make our egg carton teeth.

This is super simple, I just cut each 6 pack egg carton in half, and that worked as one basic set of teeth per child.

Then we used old tooth brushes to paint our teeth white.

The kids worked out straight away that “We’re painting them white with the tooth brushes like we brush our teeth to keep them white and healthy”.

If you prefer, you can also use real toothpaste for this activity. This could be helpful if your child has an aversion to the smell or taste of some toothpastes as it allows them to explore in a different context, and start to get familiar with the sensory experiences.

A lot of children are not comfortable with the stronger minty toothpastes, so if you want to introduce a new toothpaste, this is a low pressure opportunity for kids to explore.

Egg boxes make great teeth for this activity since they have dips and bumps in between each egg space, so children can see how they have to work carefully to get their toothbrush in to paint all the little gaps. It helps them see how it’s easy to miss bits if you’re not careful.

This creative dental activity is a fun way to remind kids about the importance of oral health, and takes less than 5 minutes to set up. You get to re-use your old stuff that would have otherwise gone in the bin too, which is always nice.

Fun activities like these are a great way to remind little ones of the importance of properly brushing teeth two times a day for two minutes each time to help prevent plaque and cavities.

You can talk about the different strokes needed to make sure we get all parts of the teeth, brushing right down to the gums and on the backs of the teeth too. The egg carton teeth provide a brilliant hands-on 3D model to demonstrate all of this.

It may take a lot of concentration, but is a great way to keep little hands busy on a rainy day – and to learn a life lesson.

Kids’ Healthy Mouths has partnered with Scholastic to continue to educate parents and teachers on the importance of brushing. Resources are available at Scholastic.com/HealthyTeeth for caregivers and Scholastic.com/2min2x for teachers where they can download lesson plans, activities, an oral health care book list, oral health care tips in English and Spanish, and a printable oral health poster.

This is a great activity for Dental Week, or Dental Health month this February. You might think it’s hard to find fun dental crafts, but with the right supplies and ideas even a topic like toothbrushing and goods oral health can become a whole lot of fun!

It’s never too early to start learning about the importance of taking care of ourselves and our bodies, so toddlers and preschoolers will gain a whole lot of benefit from touching upon these topics. This activity is perfect for the preschool age group.

As an optional extra, you can introduce supplies like floss or interdental brushes. and let the kids explore these along with their toothbrushes.

More Egg Carton Crafts

Make this egg cartons ice cream cones craft

Or you might like these 16 cute egg carton crafts

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