This is a logo for an awareness campaign. Your task is to guess what is it for. What do each of the symbols mean?
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Does it help to know that the central figure is a bar of soap? The one on the left represents water. And the one on the right is a hand.
The answer is Global Handwashing Day. The symbols are designed to remind children of the effect water and soap can have on hands - which is to save lives. Experts suggest that by reducing the germs which cause infections, simple handwashing can save more lives in the developing world than any single vaccine or medical intervention.
Activity ideas
- Practise and learn the approved way of handwashing. Download a step-by-step chart from the related documents section of the newsthink handwashing assembly kit.
- Visit the Global Handwashing Day website and identify three facts you didn't know before that you'd like other people to know too. Then devise ways to tell them.
- Explore hand washing as a metaphor signifying a refusal to accept guilt. Think Pontius Pilate or Lady Macbeth.
- Learn how soap is made. Try getting fat to react with ashes of hardwoods.
- Find out how people washed before soap. Ancient Greeks and Romans applied oil to their skin and scraped it and the dirt off with a curved piece of metal called a strigil.