Yesterday we had a special visitor. Fergus's mum came to visit our classroom, she is a Scientist. She came to speak to us about germs. At the start we made a hypothesis about how many germs we thought would be on our hands during a normal day and if there would be more or less germs after washing our hands. First we split up into three groups; one would not wash their hands, the second would only wash with water and the third group would use both soap and water. We then used a swab to wipe our hands and transfer the germs to a dish which Fergus' mum took back to the laboratory to see if any germs would grow. Then we were given some pretend germs to spread over our hands and look at them under a light which was in a black bag. Finally we washed our hands again with soap and water and got another chance to look at our hands under the light to see how well we can wash away all the germs.
Fergus' mum then brought back our dishes with the germs so we could see our results and check if our hypothesis was correct. We can look at the graph and see that with no washing there are lots of germs on our hands, when washing with water only there is less but still some germs and when we use both soap and water we get rid of most of the germs on our hands. Our hypothesis was correct! We have to wash our hands with soap and water to get rid of the germs we get on our hands.
