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At school, kids share crayons and desks, sit beside each other at lunch and don’t always keep their hands where they should be. All of that means you could end up with a sick child, which is never fun and makes it especially important to try to prevent kids from catching a cold and or flu during the academic year.

“There are a lot of germs lurking in schools," Dr. Richard Martinello, an adult and pediatric infectious disease specialist at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, told weather.com.

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“There’s a lot of kids, they’re typically together in a small space, and kids have a tendency to spread their secretions a little bit more and to be a little less careful when they cough or sneeze than adults,” he said. “Schools are kind of a perfect place to spread germs around.”

Here’s a closer look at the illnesses that may strike children in the next few months, along with prevention ideas.

Be Aware Of Higher Risk

When you have a sick child with the flu or a cold, everyone in the household is generally at a greater risk for falling ill.

“Prevention is important because children can pick up germs at school, get sick themselves and then bring it home to siblings and grandparents and potentially cause severe illness in those at high risk of complications from cold or flu,” he added.

Kids who are sick with the influenza virus or have a common cold may be more contagious than adults, and they can spread their germs for longer than grownups do, Martinello said.

“Usually the younger the child, the more virus is shed,” he said.

Kids sick with the flu pose a threat to the rest of the household because they often need help from a parent or another adult and are in close contact with them.

“That adult caring for them is at high risk for them to pick up flu from their child,” Martinello said. “It’s even more important to get vaccinated. There’s nothing worse than when everybody is sick in the household and nobody is there to care for those too sick to get out of bed.”

While the flu and a cold are both respiratory illnesses that can cause similar symptoms, with the flu, there would also likely be a high fever above 101.5 and body aches, Martinello said. Kids with influenza may also have vomiting and diarrhea.

“That leads to a lot of missed school, it can lead to a lot of missed work and really a lack of productivity because you’re home sick and in bed," Martinello said.

“The flu also is a killer, and each year in United States, there’s thousands to tens of thousands of people who die due to the flu each year,” he added. “We see each year in U.S. many of the individuals may be young, otherwise-healthy children who get a bad case of the flu and end up dying from it. Luckily it is rare, but it is something that we do see every year here in the U.S.”

Colds

The common cold can keep kids home from school, and school-aged kids may be plagued by around six colds per year, Martinello said.

Kids are most contagious in the first few days of their cold, which can last up to a week. Viruses that cause the common cold are spread through the air through respiratory secretions or by touching a contaminated surface and then touching your nose or eyes.

“It’s not unusual to see a cold kind of march its way through the house, where one person brings it home and then the other people start to get sick,” Martinello said. “With most of viruses that cause colds, generally others will start to get sick a day or two after they’re exposed.”

Colds typically bring on a runny nose and sore throat and generally get better on their own. While some kids don’t miss any school, a cold can keep a child home for a day or two. Complications from a cold include an ear or sinus infection or pneumonia, Martinello said.

Flu

The flu often requires kids to miss school. “Oftentimes they’re out of school for multiple days, and it’s not unusual for them to be out for a whole week,” Martinello said.

The flu is mainly spread believed to be spread from person to person through respiratory droplets in the air; the virus may also be spread through contaminated surfaces.

Kids can spread the flu virus to family members, who could become ill two to four days after they’ve been exposed. While adults are the most contagious during the first two days of the flu, kids are the most contagious for the first five days, Martinello said.

Whether others at home will come down with the flu depends on several factors.

“A lot of it depends on whether they got a flu shot and whether their immune system may be able to fight off the virus, how much close contact they have with the sick individual and whether they’re washing their hands and keeping their hands out of their eyes and nose,” Martinello said.

The flu is more dangerous for kids than a common cold. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that millions of kids become ill with the flu each year, thousands are hospitalized and some die.

Illness Prevention

The methods to help prevent a cold or the flu are the same with one exception: the flu shot, Martinello said. There is no vaccine to prevent the common cold.

To help prevent illness, kids should be encouraged to wash their hands frequently especially after they come home from school, where they have touched shared objects all day long, like desks and chairs, doorknobs and perhaps crayons and cellphones.

They should also be urged to keep their hands out of their eyes and nose, which can lead to illness if they’ve picked up cold or flu germs on their hands, Martinello said.

“We all have to touch things, open doors, push elevator buttons, we have to sit at a desk and our hands will be on that desk,” Martinello noted. “What’s really important is washing our hands with some frequency, and then keeping our hands out of our nose and eyes.”

Kids should also be encouraged to avoid close contact with people who seem to be sick, which includes hugging, kissing and even sitting near someone else, Martinello said.

“If you see somebody who seems to be sick, try to keep separated from them, but if you can’t,   for example, if you need to help them, make sure you wash your hands after you have that contact,” Martinello said.

K​now your flu risk. Check out the Flu Tracker on The Weather Channel App.