Play School: Safety

This week's Play School lesson was probably our most important lesson for the whole year. Our topic was.... SAFETY!

Concepts: Fire safety, stranger safety, Who can I ask for help?

Activities/art/games: The first thing we talked about was fire safety, and we took 5 minutes to practice "Stop, drop, and roll!" and crawling under the smoke. Oh, and it also helped get the wiggles out :)

Red Light, Green Light is a great game to help kids internalize the importance of obeying traffic signals.

We practiced dialing 911 on a toy phone (I emphasized the importance of only calling 911 in a real emergency and gave a few examples of times that they should call 911). For our art project, we made construction paper cell phones. The kids glued number grids on them, then colored in the 9 and the 1.

Books: Not Everyone Is Nice: Helping Children Learn Caution with Strangers by Federick Alimonti and Ann Tedesco; Ten Steps to Staying Safe by Cynthia MacGregor

Songs: This is the way we cross the road,

cross the road, cross the road.

This is the way we cross the road,

we stop, we look, we listen.

We stand at the curb and look both ways,

look both ways, look both ways.

We stand at the curb and look both ways,

before we cross the road.

Snack: cut up Kiwi fruit (green), cup up strawberries (red), pineapple tidbits (yellow) arranged like a traffic light.

Field Trip: On Tuesday, we met up with M and her kids and two other moms and their kids in our neighborhood and went to the fire station, where we watched a short fire safety video, toured the station, and each got our very own fireman helmet!

Here is B trying on a real fire helmet.

And the whole group with the nice fireman who gave us a tour!