The main personal tooth care skills relate to: * BRUSHING * FLOSSING * CHEWING
BRUSHING skills clean gum margins that are easy to access. Few cavities occur at gum margins even though brushing skills, brushes, time and frequency of brushing vary considerably. However poor brushing causes bleeding gums, an early sign of gum disease. Good brushing is important for healthy gums.

Like the brush, saliva has good access to gum margins to neutralise acid and repair demineralised tooth but not between teeth and inside grooves.
Flossing  skills clean between teeth and are important to help prevent cavities and gum disease between teeth.
Chewing  skills are most important to help seal grooves before eating and help saliva clean grooves after eating and prevent cavities inside grooves.

Almost all cavities occur between teeth and inside grooves where the brush, toothpaste, mouthwash, chewing gum and saliva cannot reach.

You can see fillings in the back teeth but food can be trapped between some fillings and the tooth enlarging the cavity so the filling falls out and often a bit of tooth breaks off. Two teeth do not have fillings because those grooves do not trap food.

Simple EXPERIMENTS IN THE SCHOOL KIT show how to:
Remove plaque from gum margins and between teeth and seal groves in back teeth before eating breakfast to prevent sugar being changed to acid.
Remove food after eating by brushing, flossing and chewing skills to help saliva neutralise acid and repair demineralised tooth.

Lets look at easy ways that we may achieve this with these skills and not leave food on teeth after eating every meal or snack.
Brush, floss and chew a sealant like cheese before breakfast to prevent food being trapped and there is no plaque to change food like sugar to acid.
Chew a fibre like celery or dental foam after every meal or snack to help saliva remove food, neutralise acid and repair demineralised tooth.
Dental foam can also clean gum margins and between teeth but plaque takes about 9 hours to build up after cleaning before breakfast.
Chew a sealant before each meal or snack ot seal grooves. This can be done while chewing foam after eating to help displace trapped food.
Brush with fluoride toothpaste and floss before bed but do not rinse fluoride off teeth.

Supertooth survey for over 12 years old Survey of 6 to 13 year old click here

Develop your own class surveys for maths/science projects and use the technology of the internet to share your projects