Safety Project
We recently heard about a poster contest at my husband’s work. The theme is “safety at home”. This is a topic that has become pretty important to us since our children are pretty precocious and get into everything despite all of our baby proofing efforts. They climb everything. They remove the baby proofing devices. And they always seem to find something that I forgot to put away like the permanent markers that were left out in an accessible place. (Alas, that is a story for another time…)
In order to prepare to make our poster, we are learning about safety at home first. We started today with learning about the letter “x”. My daughter wanted to work on that particular letter anyway, and it works well for safety lessons. You can use “x” to cross out anything that is not safe for the children to touch.
Start with how to write the letter “x”. The kids love writing on the chalkboard, so we took turns writing the letter on the board. Then we made a Xavier the Pirate craft. (Hat Tip: First-School and DLTK) We made ours into a stick puppet, though. We love pirates so we ran with that theme and dressed up as pirates to go on a “safety hunt” instead of a treasure hunt. Xavier helped us to hunt around our home for things we should not touch (especially the things that the kids have been known to find). We marked those things with the letter “x” as a reminder to not touch these things. (Yes, we used the same permanent marker that the children got into before!) We looked mostly for things like medicines, soaps, mouthwash, and things related to fire.
I love the kinesthetic nature of this project and hope that it helps the kids to remember the lesson we’re learning here. By giving the children the opportunity to find and mark the untouchable items, they are taking ownership of this rule. The lesson played on their interests as well – a pretending and dressing up game – to draw them in. Also, seeing what each of the “no touch” items look like will give them a point of reference if they are in someone else’s home. Even though the item might not be marked with an “x”, they might recognize it as a “no touch” item simply by sight. Hopefully, all of their active participation in the project will help them grasp the meaning of the lesson giving my a little peace of mind and giving them some ideas for their poster.
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