This teacher's brilliant hack will convince your kids to wash their hands

If your little ones need a reminder to wash their hands, this clever hack might just do the trick.

Teacher Donna Allen posted the clever idea, which she uses with her students, on Facebook and it quickly went viral.

Allen, who teaches nursing assistants in North Carolina, posted the photo of three pieces of bread in three separate snaplock bags taped to a wall.

The bags were labelled: ‘controlled’, ‘clean hands’ and ‘dirty hands’.

Explaining the experiment, Allen starts, “To all my teacher friends, this is the grossest yet coolest experiment. I did this while teaching about germs and how they spread.”

“You let all the kids see you put a piece of bread in a baggy with a glove on hence ‘controlled’ then you wash your hands and put a piece of bread in a baggy for ‘clean’ last but definitely not least you pass a piece of bread around and let every kid in class touch it then you put it in a baggy and label it dirty."

“Watch how the bread changes over time due to germs. It is so cool and a great way to teach the importance of handwashing," Allen says.

Her post has been shared more than 70,000 times and had more than 15,000 comments.

Many commented praising Allen’s idea as “interesting” and “an eye opener”, while others tagged their friends who they thought would like the idea.

Allen told Scary Mommy part of her teaching students to take care of patients involved teaching them to wash their hands, adding this experiment was a “perfect” method.

But she suggested the experiment could also be used to teach young kids the same lesson.