Throughout the dental hygiene program, we  were given the opportunity to provide knowledge and oral hygiene instructions to the community and public.

The first program I was able to participate in was the outreach program “Give Kids a Smile”, organized by Dr. Bilello and Prof. Haynes.  In this program we were able to interact and screen many students from the Ronald Edmunds Learning Center. It was nice to provide knowledge on oral hygiene care to these students since this age range would be when most of the permanent dentition would begin or have begun to erupt. I especially like being able to screen and apply sodium fluoride varnish to the kindergarten students. This exercise allowed me to understand and improve my skills in screening that is; to know what we are looking for and knowledge of teeth that should be present, depending on the child’s age. If I had the opportunity to participate in an outreach program like this I would do it again.

In one of our service learning project, for public health class, my group was able to provide our knowledge to 5th grade students in Saint Demetrios Astoria School. In this activity we were able to inform students about nutritional habits, cavity formation, and correct tooth brushing and flossing techniques. The students that were enthusiastic and interactive which made us love this project. Although we were there to inform and teach the students; we also learned that they were every educated in oral health care that they knew the correct answers to our questions. This made my group understand that the younger we teach our kids about correct oral hygiene habits the better the outcome of their oral hygiene status will become.

The last service learning program I was able to participate was in the dental health outreach activity at Family Headstart Program Center/ Pre-k Elementary School. In this program, directed by Prof. Lam, we were able to instructed pre- kindergartners on tooth brushing and nutritional habits. Our group was as to use props to demonstrate correct tooth brushing, Fones, technique and a short video called “Geena The Giraffe’s Tremendous Tooth Adventure” by Oral-B for oral hygiene care and nutrition education. It was great to see how much information these kids were able to absorb from a video on oral hygiene and how much they knew about going to the dentist. Many of the children knew the the tell- show- do method which made me understand how resourceful the technique is for making a patient comfortable at the dentist.