Glitter Germs

I have had a lot of requests about the activity we did with the glitter germs. I was planning on doing this activity before I learned that I was having a Science visitor in my class and I decided to go ahead and include the person visiting in the activity. We have just begun introducing and talking about an I Am A Scientist Unit. We had only been in school for 7 days when we started this activity. We had been discussing safe practices during our Science time and part of that discussion is proper hand washing. I pretended to cough as the children gathered in the group area and I excused myself to get some hand sanitizer that contained the glitter. We played Dr. Jean's Hello Neighbor as a warm up activity and as everyone shook hands the glitter spread from hand to hand. It did not take long for everyone to notice the glitter. Once the song was over we discussed the transfer of germs and that germs are unseen. We decided that we needed to wash our hands to get rid of the germs. When we returned to our meeting area we realized that some of us had glitter still on our hands and we looked at our hands with hand lenses. We had a discussion about proper hand washing. After hand washing the proper way, we recorded our observations in our Science Notebooks and then we discussed the results!