Highly Commended: Picture book | Teaching children at school and kindy to wash their hands.

What is the problem you found?

We asked a teacher and she said especially with COVID 19 it is difficult to encourage small children in prep and kindy to wash their hands before they eat. They need to get into the habit of doing this and know why they are doing it. Children are inquisitive and need an answer to their question.

What is your opportunity?

How might we teach small children to wash their hands before eating?

Who is your audience?

The reader would be a teacher, teacher assistant or adult. The audience would be the children. It could even be used at home so children are familiar with this when they start school. This would be perfect in a large picture book! We would also like this made into a visual book so it can be played on a large screen while the children are getting ready to eat.

What Is Your Solution?

 We thought a short story that included lots of colourful pictures, sight and rhyming words and counting would be beneficial so the children are learning in a fun way.  This book could be read in school or kindy before children have their morning tea, munch and crunch and big lunch. 

We have created a picture book with our own illustrations. The story contains, sight and rhyming words as well as high frequency words and counting as this is an important part of the Early Years Australian Curriculum for prep and kindy children. It is fun and it gets the message across that you should wash your hands before you eat. We have researched the market and there does not seem a book that actually focuses on washing hands before you eat that could be used in schools. 

Our book has been tested in a school and was a great success, the children loved it. We wrote the book from a child's perspective which brings the book to life. To improve our idea we could even include puppets to help tell the story. We hope this is a good educational resource and will be used in school and at home. If successful we could even write more books and make learning fun.

Support Required

Connections

After we have written our small book we are not sure where do we go from here? What is the next step? How would we get it published?

Funding

Getting a book published and marketed can be a costly business, how would we raise funds or find a sponsor? 

Advice

We know if there are other books that have be written about germs and washing hands but we have tried to make our specifically for children at school/ kindy or just learning to wash hands before eating. Do you have any suggestions how we might improve our small book? 

Development

We would really like this book to be used in the classroom as an educational resource but unsure who we would approach to make this happen.