We all know that good hand hygiene is important to encourage in our children. My children needs plenty of gentle encouragement to wash their hands when they come home from school or before meal times. Of course it’s important for everyone to keep their hands clean to prevent spreading germs, especially at times of seasonal outbreaks.

How to you encourage your children to stop spreading germs

We’ve been following the NHS guidelines for the last few weeks. These include:

Wash your hands with soap and water often – do this for at least 20 seconds
Always wash your hands when you get home or into work
Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue or your sleeve (not your hands) when you cough or sneeze
Put used tissues in the bin straight away and wash your hands afterwards
Try to avoid close contact with people who are unwell

Encourage kids to wash their hands

I’m always keen to encourage clean hands at home and have shared several ways to encourage kids to wash their hands by making soap fun! Yes, it’s actually fun to update liquid soap dispensers with their favourite characters. We’ve added small plastic toys to soap dispensers. Everyone time you push the dispenser down, the movement of the liquid soap causes the plastic toys to move around! This has been a great way to encourage the children to wash their hands!

We’ve also had fun making our own bars of soap. Again these can be made into your favourite characters. I used a lollypop mould to create soap in the shape of lego men, and even placed a toy Han Solo figure into a bar of soap for my Star Wars obsessed husband.

Here are some of our soap tutorials if you want to jazz up your soap dispensers, as well as some we have Pinned to make later!