America’s Toothfairy®
…because every child deserves a healthy smile.
Oral Health Education
Toothfairy Island
A major platform for NCOHF: America’s Toothfairy, is providing oral health education for children and their families. NCOHF provides its Affiliates with a variety of engaging, science-based educational materials for parents, children of all ages and professionals to expand and enhance their critical oral health services.
Toothfairy Island (TFI) provides a character-based curriculum that is available in English or Spanish. The materials include puzzles, games, puppets, charts and other things that help children have fun while learning about good oral health.
Toothfairy Island programs are geared to children and are simple and comprehensive.
TFI is an interactive original character-based program, which expands the myth of the Toothfairy. It is based on the belief that the mouth is the gateway to the body and therefore, oral health is closely tied to overall health and well-being.
Nutrition, prevention of germs transmission, safe play, true science as well as oral health instruction are all integrated into the wide variety of engaging materials.
Toothfairy Island curriculum packages for Affiliates are used in a variety of settings:
- Patients in active treatment at Affiliate centers
- School based oral health programs
- Student Field Trips to Affiliate centers
- Dental screenings in schools, health fairs, etc.
Learn more about the Toothfairy Island educational curriculum.
Baby Oral Health Program (BOHP)
Despite significant improvement in the oral health of Americans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported an overall increase in dental caries among 2-5 year old children. This unfortunate circumstance sets the stage for many young children to continue a lifetime of poor oral health.
Preschool-aged children with early preventive dental visits are more likely to use subsequent preventive dental services and experience lower dentally-related costs. At the same time, the American Dental Association now recommends the age 1 visit and this concept is becoming a higher priority in the minds of the public. Taken together, it is clear that current and future parents will be looking to the general dentists to offer infant and toddler oral health services; however, training in these services is relatively new in most dental school curricula, leaving many general dentists without the scientific underpinnings or clinical experience to cater to infants and toddlers.
To address this problem, the Department of Pediatric Dentistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has developed an educational program titled Baby Oral Health Program (BOHP). As part of this program, an infant and toddler oral health kit has been developed to provide the entire dental team with the necessary background information, technique demonstration and educational materials. This preventive program promotes early oral health values and the establishment of a dental patient for life.
The Baby Oral Health Program materials are made available to each NCOHF Affiliate.
