Making Hand Washing Fun!

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When the children were younger I really focused on teaching them to wash their hands properly and always reminding them to wash their hands, so I assumed that they were still doing it properly...until I actually checked the other day!  So, I realised that we needed a little reminder, especially with all of the germs currently going around.


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I first started focusing on teaching the children to wash their hands properly when Ethan was about to start school, you can read more about that here in our post about Back to School Hand Washing Water Play, where I also talk about the 7 steps of proper hand washing.

So I have reminded the children of those seven steps and how long they need to be washing their hands and that they always need to use soap!  (Not that 5 second rinse with cold water that they were doing!)  I was also trying to think of some ways to make washing their hands a bit more fun and interesting.

Hand Washing Experiments

First of all it's always a great idea to show children just how covered their hands get in germs, and just how much scrubbing they have to do to get those germs off!  And the best way to show this is by getting their hands really, really dirty.  So cover those hands in sand, or paint or glitter and then ask your child to wash their hands as they normally would.  Then see how much is left on their hands.  Then ask them to wash again until it is all gone, to show that is how long they should always be washing.


Use Fun Soap to Wash Hands

We use a variety of soaps around the house to wash our hands that we would recommend:
  • Child's Farm hand wash is our number one choice because both children have sensitive skin and are prone to dry skin and eczema (We are brand ambassadors for Child's Farm, but do buy most of the products ourselves.)
  • We also really like the foam soap from Method as it is foamy and easy to spread around and cover the whole hands
  • If the children didn't have such sensitive skin I would definitely buy some of the other fun foaming and colourful soaps to make hand washing fun.
  • For a more eco option or if you just prefer bar soap you could always go somewhere like Lush to let your children choose their own colourful and wonderful smelling soap that they would like to use to wash their hands
  • You could also make your own soap.  I've started buying the melt and pour soap, adding our own scents and colours then pouring into fun moulds to make our own fun soaps (like these blue Mickey Mouse ones!)


Sing a Hand Washing Song

The official recommendation is to wash your hands for as long as it takes to sing 'Happy Birthday'  or the alphabet song, and as fun as that is I thought it might be more fun to make up our own special hand washing songs (to the tune of songs that we already love!)  And it seems that I've become oddly addicted to the process, so I've got quite a few.  

 Our first one that we're sharing is 'Into the Hand Soap' to the tune of 'Into the Unknown' from Frozen 2.



Into the hand soap, 
Into the hand soap,
Into the hand sooooooo-ap...
Are you washing, 
Are you scrubbing,
Are you rubbing,
Are you cleaning?
Aaaaaa aaaaa,
Aaaaaa aaaaa...
(repeat)
As promised, here are a few more songs, what do you sing when you wash your hands?




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Niki is a stay at home Mom of two young children; Ethan and Ivy. As a former teacher she tries to bring fun and learning into the activities that they do each day.

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