Because the plague was spread by bacteria, we decided to investigate how bacteria spreads around our classroom. Given the current circumstances, this seemed an especially important investigation. In order to do this, we took swabs with sterilised cotton bud tips of various items around the classroom. These included: teacher laptop, door handle, topic book, pencil, hands, table, hand sanitiser bottle, a glue stick and an iPad. Once the swabs were taken, they were rubbed on to agar jelly, held in Petri dishes. These were left for three weeks to cultivate the bacteria gathered.
We hypothesised that the iPad would be the dirtiest item in our classroom. To our amazement, and Miss Harmar’s horror, the teacher laptop was by far the dirtiest, causing the greatest amount of bacteria growth on the agar jelly. Also surprisingly, the child’s hands were in fact the cleanest among all the items, which shows what a superb job one child is doing when washing their hands.
The children loved plotting their results onto a bar graph, and Miss Harmar has already ordered her laptop wipes....!!
