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North Adams Preschoolers Now Brushing Their Teeth in School

Michelle Nicholas helps two of her students find their toothbrushes from the tray.

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — In a football game, the two-minute warning signals that the end of the game is near. In reality, two minutes is a really, really, REALLY long time.

Just ask the preschoolers in the North Adams Public Schools Prekindergarten Program, who are the first to begin a new initiative in which kids brush their teeth after breakfast and lunch right at school.

"That's been the hardest thing," admitted preschool teacher Michelle Nicholas, who twice daily shepherds pairs of tots into the bathroom, asks them if they can remember which color toothbrush belongs to them, lets them choose between pink and blue toothpaste, and helps them through the two-minute process of scrubbing their little pearly whites.

To help make those two minutes go more quickly, Nicholas brings an iPad into the bathroom and uses the Colgate SmileMakers app, which plays a catchy little tune while counting down in large numbers that the children can see. Halfway through, the kids switch from brushing their bottom teeth to their top teeth, and at the end they brush their tongues.

"Teaching them front, back and side ties right into our curriculum," said Nicholas, a mother of two who has taught preschool for 12 years. "This is wonderful."

That was the goal of the program, initiated by local dentist Jenny Citrin. Citrin said that upon graduating from Tufts Dental School, she knew she wanted to do something in the community to promote oral health, something that is stressed in Tufts' mission statement.

She created the project while participating in a leadership program of Landmark, an international training and development company known for offering its flagship course The Landmark Forum; part of the coursework was to create a project that benefits the community. 

"There's a big issue in the area with high cavity rate and not knowing how to brush their teeth," Citrin said. That, coupled with the fact that the kids were eating in school with no way to brush afterward, spurred her into action to create a program that would introduce supervised brushing into school.

So she approached Superintendent of Schools Barbara Malkas and Maris Owczarski, a health administrator at Brayton Elementary School, and pitched the idea of a pre-K through Grade 5 in-school brushing program, starting with the preschoolers.

"They were on board," said Citrin, who added that Nicholas was particularly thrilled when approached about adding the brushing into her preschool classroom. "It was the one thing for her that was missing."

After finding their toothbrush, the children choose from blue or pink toothpaste.

 

For now, the program has been privately funded for one year and is fully implemented in all eight pre-kindergarten classrooms. Citrin said she hopes to secure funding to expand the program to include all North Adams kids up to Grade 5, and in the meantime is working with students from both Williams College and Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts to do some preparations with books and discussions on oral health.

Back in Nicholas' classroom, her enthusiasm for her young charges' dental health was obvious. She asked them if they had brushed over the weekend at home, and she gently and patiently led them through the process a proper brushing, sometimes verbally guiding and sometimes lending an actual helping hand.

"OK, we're on our bottoms," she directed two preschoolers, coaxing them into changing the angle of their toothbrush. The children readily accepted the directions, something that can be attributed to the preparations Nicholas did before the toothbrushes themselves came the first week of March.

"It was a lot of pre-teaching," said Nicholas, who said she found an app that allowed the kids to virtually practice brushing properly. And then came the supplies.

"We picked out our toothbrushes and got to put our names on them," she said.

The countdown app is a big hit, she said, as one little boy danced his way through the two minutes. As one little girl walked back to the classroom, she said to Nicholas, "I really like that song." The two continued a conversation, and when Nicholas returned to the bathroom to rave about the program, she said she just loved conversations like that.

"It made my day when one of my little ones said, 'My mom put the app on my Kindle,'" she said. "It's just simply wonderful."

Amphibious Toads Procreate in Perplexing Amplexus

By Tor HanseniBerkshires columnist
08:09PM / Sunday, May 05, 2024

 

Toads lay their eggs in the spring along the edges of waterways. Photos by Tor Hansen.

My first impressions of toads came about when my father Len Hansen rented a seaside house high on a sand dune in North Truro, Cape Cod back in 1954. 

 

With Cape Cod Bay stretching out to the west, and Twinefield so abundant in wildflowers to the east, North Truro became a naturalist's dream, where I could search for sea shells at the seashore, or chase beetles and butterflies with my trusty green butterfly net. 

 

Twinefield was a treasure trove for wildlife — a vast glacial rolling sandplain shaped by successive glaciers, its sandy soil rich in silicon, thus able to stimulate growth for a diverse biota. A place where in successive years I would expand my insect collection to fill cigar boxes with every order of insects abounding in beach plum, ox-eye daisy and milkweed. During our brief summer vacation there, we boys would exclaim in our excitement, "Oh here is another hoppy toad," one of many Fowler's toads (Bufo woodhousei fowleri ) that inhabited the moist surroundings, at home in the Ammophyla beach grass, thickets of beach plum, bayberry, and black cherry bushes. 

 

They sparkled in rich colors of green amber on beige and reddish tinted warts. Most anurans have those glistening eyes, gold on black irises so beguiling around the dark pupils. Today I reflect on a favorite analogy, the riveting eye suggests a solar eclipse in pictorial aura.

 

In the distinct toad majority in the Outer Cape, Fowler's toads turned up in the most unusual of places. When we Hansens first moved in to rent Riding Lights, we would wash the sand and salt from our feet in the outdoor shower where toads would be drinking and basking in the moisture near my feet. As dusk fades into darkness, the happy surprise would gather under the night lights where moths were fluttering about the front door and the toads would snatch bugs with outstretched tongue.

 

In later years, mother Eleanor added much needed color and variety to Grace's original garden. Our smallest and perhaps most acrobatic butterflies are the skippers, flitting and somersaulting to alight and drink heartily the nectar abounding at yellow sickle-leaved coreopsis and succulent pink live forever sedums of autumn. These hearty late bloomers signaled oases for many fall migrants including painted ladies, red admirals and of course monarchs on there odyssey to over-winter in Mexico. 

 

Our newly found next-door neighbors, the Bergmarks, added a lot to share our zeal for this undiscovered country, and while still in our teens, Billy Atwood, who today is a nuclear physicist in California, suggested we should include the Baltimore checkerspot in our survey, as he too had a keen interest in insects. Still unfamiliar to me then, in later years I would come across a thriving colony in Twinefield, that yielded a rare phenotype checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton p. superba) that I wrote about featured in The Cape Naturalist ( Museum of Natural History, Brewster Cape Cod 1991).