 Hello, and welcome to the first introductory lesson to the Personal Care and Hygiene Unit. Within this lesson, we're going to be going over Hygiene. Some things we're going to go over is what is Hygiene, what causes us to be sick, and some important things you can do to stay hygienic and clean. A good example of this is right here with his elephant. He's spraying himself off with water to clean himself off. Hygiene is important because it keeps you healthy and prevents you from being sick. The best way to do this is to promote cleanliness. A great example of this is right here with this ma'am, as you can see right here, scrubbing down the deck of a ship. This gets rid of the germs and debris that can make you sick. As I said before, hygiene reduces your chance of being sick, which gives you more time to play like these wonderful kids down here. Good hygiene can lead you to do better in school. A great example of this is right here with these children raising their hands to answer a question asked by the teacher. However, not everyone practices good hygiene all the time, and this can have really bad effects on your health. 25% of all childhood deaths worldwide are due to children not practicing good hygiene. To help put that in perspective for you, I have this picture right here of these four children. If none of them practice good hygiene, unfortunately one of them will die. We'll cross off a little shame here. This is unfortunate because the good hygiene is really easy to do, and we'll cover that more in later lessons within this unit. I've been saying a lot throughout this lesson that good hygiene prevents sickness, but what is it exactly that spreads sickness and what actually gets us sick? There are these things called germs. Germs are microorganisms that attack your body to make you sick. Well, that's a big word right there, microorganism. So let's break it down, let's split it in half. Micro means it's too small for the human eye to see, and organism means it's a living thing. So germs are these tiny living things that are constantly trying to attack your body to make you sick and ill. Now that you know about germs, I'm sure you're asking yourself, but wait, how do germs actually cause sickness within my body? They do this in two main ways. The first being, they take away nutrients away from your body. Now, nutrients are important because they keep your body running in tip-top shape and they keep you healthy. The second way is germs produce toxins. Toxins are essentially poisons that attack your body and cause you to be sick. Some examples of this are rashes, coughing, fever, and vomiting. And as you can hear, that I have, the sniffles. Oh, forgot the L there, there you go. To help study germs, we have to use a microscope, which is an example over right here. Microscopes help magnify the germs and we can see them on a much bigger scale. Doctors who have gone to school for a very long time can help use microscopes to identify the type of germ that's in your body. By doing this, they can help provide care and treatment. Having easy access to soap can be difficult. So some alternatives you can use are ash or dry soil to wash your hands. Now, I know what you're thinking. Wait a second. The point of washing my hands is to get the dirt and germs off of it. How is using dirt to wash my hands actually clean them? Well, with scrubbing your hands with dirt ash, you're scrubbing the germs and surface debris off your hands and then you rinse it off. This gets rid of the germs and the debris off your hands and prevents you from spreading them to other people. Now, we're throwing a lot of terms at you. Germs, hygiene, hand washing, using dirt as opposed to soap. So I'm sure you have a lot of questions or ideas or you've heard a lot of things about hygiene. So we just wanted to spell some myths to help you better understand it. For one, some people think that just running your hand under water is important to clean your hand. This right here is a myth. Though you will remove the surface germs and debris off your hands, there are still germs deep down in your hands that can still be spread. Another myth that is out there is that soap is only used for bathing and when cleaning your laundry. This right here is a myth. Soap is important in washing your hands and should be used most importantly before and after using the toilet and before and after handling food. Now, in the following lessons, we're going to teach you a lot of cool stuff about hygiene such as how to clean your hands, how to clean your mouth, how to treat a wound or cut, and how to deal with lice. So stay tuned and get ready to have some good clean fun.