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ROSALIE'S NEIGHBORHOOD

Let's Smile! A Book about Dental Health

Rosalie’s Neighborhood, Let’s Smile: A Book about Dental Health, is a parent awareness health literacy unit that provides essential oral health care information for parents of young children. The book is written at a 4th grade reading level so that parents with limited literacy skills can read and understand vital information for providing home and professional preventive and emergency health care for children. The curriculum will help parents improve their reading skills as well as learn more about dental health care for their children.Toothbrush image


The Let’s Smile curriculum includes an illustrated narrative story about Rosalie, an understanding grandmother who has custody of her granddaughter, and two young mothers and their children as they share information about what they have learned about caring for their children’s health, especially oral health, needs. The curriculum includes a detailed Facilitator’s Guide with lesson plans, resources, songs and fingerplays, and printable word games. The Facilitator’s Guide also provides tips on how to use the curriculum with different audiences (beginning readers, advanced readers, and English Language Learners) as well as a glossary and an annotated bibliography of children’s books about oral and dental health. For teachers to help students with reading fluency and to bring the story to life, there is also a Readers Theater script.


Let’s Smile is the result of a collaboration between two research organizations. The Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy at The Pennsylvania State University provided the literacy expertise, and the National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research of the National Institutes for Health provided the oral health expertise. The materials were piloted with family literacy programs and reviewed by a family dentist consultant.

For more information about dentistry from infancy through adulthood, please go to New Mouth Family Dentistry.