Celebrate Tooth Fairy Day - April 28, 2012
What do fairies do with all those teeth? Grab your wand and put on your wings to meet the Tooth Fairy herself and find out at Tooth Fairy Day at the National Museum of Dentistry on Saturday, April 28, from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Discover how to have a sparkling smile during an afternoon filled with tooth-riffic hands-on activities and fun. Make fairy wands and wings, and more! Children dressed as a tooth fairy are admitted free.
Healthy Smiles for Baltimore
Baltimore City Title 1 first-grade classrooms enjoy FREE trips to the National Museum of Dentistry (NMD). Funded by grants from the American Dental Association and Dentaquest, NMD is proud to provide free admission and bus subsidies to a limited number of Baltimore City first-grade classrooms. Offered on a first-come-first-served basis, these trips augment and fortify the oral health curriculum for Baltimore City Schools. Contact Cynthia Hollis by phone at 410-706-4819 or by email at
Healthy Smiles for Autism Guide - FREE download
The National Museum of Dentistry has created a new resource to help parents of children with autism spectrum disorder succeed in teaching good oral healthcare. Healthy Smiles for Autism is a guide that helps parents teach children with autism spectrum disorder how to brush and floss with the help of step-by-step instruction, social stories, and visual sequencing cards that can be used wherever brushing happens. This guide is free and downloadable at http://www.healthysmilesforautism.org.
The Healthy Smiles for Autism guide was created to empower parents of children with autism spectrum disorder with usable tools to help effectively teach their children an oral health routine. The guide also provides information to help parents prepare their children for a first dental visit.
“We want to be able to give parents readily usable tools to help their children to develop a good oral hygiene regimen,” said National Museum of Dentistry Executive Director Jonathan Landers. “We’ve combined best practices for autism education, such as visual sequencing cards and rewards systems, with proven personal oral hygiene techniques to help make the process a little bit easier.”
The National Museum of Dentistry partnered with Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for Autism and Related Disorders and University of Maryland Dental School to develop these best practices to oral health care for children with autism spectrum disorder.
Autism is a complex developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life and affects a person’s ability to communicate and interact with others—including the dentist. Dental care is the leading unmet healthcare need among children with special needs, and across all income levels, children with special needs are almost twice as likely to have an unmet oral heath care need than their peers without special needs, according to the National Maternal and Child Oral Health Resource Center.
The National Museum of Dentistry, an Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, develops unique learning opportunities to engage the public in discovering how to have a healthy mouth for life. Also available free to the public is the MouthPower website that teaches good oral health skills to children, and the Get MouthPower website that reveals the special oral health care needs of adults 50+.
The Healthy Smiles for Autism parent guide is made possible by the support of Henry Schein Cares, the Global Corporate Social Responsibility program of Henry Schein, Inc., Blakeslee Advertising, and a generous gift from Dr. Irwin and Lucia Smigel.
