Preschool - Safety

Day 1: Safety At Home


I started out our theme by reading the book I Can Be Safe.

It was a pretty good overview of all things safety, and we talked about how we need to be safe at home and when we're away from home.

To focus in on safety at home we followed that with reading Watch Out At Home.

This book talks about safety with sharp things, hot things, electricity, fire, chemicals, medicine, and emergencies.  We stopped after each section and talked about what the characters were doing wrong in each picture.

I had printed out page 47 of this book on poisonous substances with the idea of going on a danger symbol scavenger hunt (it's a picture with different symbols for poison, corrosive, explosive, and flammable).  Well, we went on the scavenger hunt, but we couldn't find a single dangerous chemical bottle in our house with a single warning symbol on them.  They all said DANGER or something like that in words, but no symbols.  I was pretty disappointed, especially the one that had the warning, "May be fatal if swallowed."  Nice.

So back to the books instead.  We read No Dragons For Tea.

It's a book about fire safety, and it was pretty good, but I felt that the fire safety elements were sometimes subverted in favor of the rhyme of the story.  But we discussed it afterwards in order to bring out the fire safety tips.

Then we role played a fire in the house.  We pretended that the smoke detector went off.  Then on the way out, the door was too hot, so we crawled along the floor to find a window.  But the Alex's clothes caught on fire and he had to stop, drop, and roll.  Then we pretended to crawl out the window and meet by the mailbox.  (Though we had a pretty heated discussion about needing to meet by a tree since that's what they did in the book, but my superior adult logic prevailed when pointing out that there were no trees to meet by and the mailbox was a much better option.)  We had talked about all this stuff just a week or two ago when Ella did fire safety week at her school, so a lot of this we were just reviewing instead of learning from scratch.

Then we finished off the day by playing the fire safety games over at the Fire Safety website.


Day 2: Safety Around Town


We started out by reading Watch Out Around Town.

It's similar to Day 1's book Around the House.  It covers what to do if you get lost, what adults are safe to ask for help, stay away from dogs you don't know, that you need to know your name, address, and phone number, don't talk to strangers, don't play in dangerous places, and so on.  Lots of good info I would never have thought to bring up.  We discussed all of it one topic at a time.

Then I wrote down our address and phone number and had Alex say them three times each.  I've also been quizzing him on them all day long.

Then we read The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers.

It goes into more detail about strangers, and how though not everyone would want to hurt you, there's always a bad apple so we have to be careful of everyone.  It does a really good job of making a somewhat scary topic much easier to explain.  I would be more like papa bear who scares the kids by showing them all the newspaper articles about missing kids and such.  Thank goodness for authors who can explain it better than me!

Then we headed to the computer and watched all the catchy little safety videos found here. They're all about how to safely cross the street and such.  There's a bunch of other fun stuff on that website too.

Then we finished off with a street sign quiz found here.  I didn't expect him to know all of them, but he did pretty good.  We briefly talked about wearing seat belts in the car and helmets on bikes, and that was it!



Day 3: Emergencies


We started today by talking about what an emergency is.  I gave examples like getting a cut on your finger, the house being on fire, mommy falling down and not talking after.  They (Ella was with us today) had to say whether it was a real emergency or not.

Then we read Impatient Pamela Calls 9-1-1.

Then I busted out a cell phone that we don't use and I had them both practice how to dial 9-1-1.  It has been shown that if you don't practice dialing it before an emergency you could freeze up and not be able to dial it when you really need to.  I showed them how to dial and then push the green button, or if they messed up, to push the red button then start over.  I also showed them how to do it on my parents' land line.

Then it was role play time!  I pretended to fall down and get hurt and the kids had to get my phone from my pocket and call 9-1-1.  I pretended to be the operator.  They had fun with this.  We also pretended like I was having to help one of the kids and couldn't call 9-1-1 and the other one had to call them.  Good fun!