Time For Tots: Teaching Kids About Saftey

Yes, you read that title right, a Time for Tot's Day. For any of you that have been reading my blog for a while now may remember the Time for Tot's days I used to do. This was a weekly time where I would take extra time to plan little lessons and little activities based around a theme for the kids. I started these days to force encourage myself to spend that extra time and make that extra effort with my kids and help them be better prepared for school in the process.

When Lucas started kindergarten, our Time for Tot's days went by the wayside. Occasionally the kids would even ask if we could do another Time for Tot's day. I would say yes, but we would get busy and just never took the extra time to do them.

It is my new goal to do at least a monthly Time For Tot's Day.

I was sitting there feeding Ryder trying to decide what we should do and I felt like our theme should be safety. I truly believe that we can and are prompted and guided at times as to what we should do and so I try to live by the motto, "if you think it, do it" when it comes to those promptings, and so safety it was.

We began by talking about our "safe people"-Mom, Dad, Grandmas and Grandpas and just a few others.

The kids then made a red and green light-which they held up the correct light depending on if a situation was good/safe-green go or bad/unsafe-red. I found a list of different scenarios as part of the safety packet on thesafeside.org*
We talked about bike safety with this matching page
We then acted out different scenarios-someone knocking on the door when the safe adult was not around, someone driving up in a car and asking for help, etc. The kids really enjoyed acting these out and were asking lots of questions while we were doing this.

Then we did a safety puzzle. The kids each cut out their puzzle and put them together and I read each piece for a final review.
And then since we had red and green lights, well why not make a yellow and play traffic light (a modified version of red light/green light)

So our return to Time for Tot's Day (you can see past ones by clicking here or on the tab at the top of the page) was a success. While we might not have made as many crafts or projects as we often would, it was a lesson with importance and an impact that will hopefully last forever.

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Resources

• Questions for scenarios came from http://www.thesafeside.com/ -- in the download center here-- under the For Educators tabs*
• Additional scenarios came from http://www.radkids.org/-under kids activities
• Bike safety page found on http://www.radkids.org/--Kids Activities-Picture match

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And Ten Things to Smile About will be in one week,
Tuesday March 1st-get your lists ready!