We held a workshop at PlusKids about looking after your teeth, and the lesson came in verse: after every meal, in the morning when you wake and in the evening before bed, pick up the toothpaste and the brush, hurry to the basin and brush the germs away — so that your smile is not only lovely, but healthy too.
The form is no indulgence. A hygiene rule said in prose is forgotten by the next day; the same rule set to rhyme stays, because rhyme forces the memory to hold on to the order. After a few repetitions, children end up reciting the verse themselves — including the part about bedtime, the most frequently skipped of them all.
In a workshop like this the conversation carries on naturally: why one brushing a day is not enough, how to hold the brush properly, what happens when brushing is skipped. These subjects work far better in a group than at home: one child asks something the others did not dare to, and the answer serves everyone.
What is left at the end is a simple message the children take home and repeat there: a lovely smile is, first of all, a healthy one.