Ideas for Teaching Safety in Child Development

Child proofing is essential to a house or day care center when little ones are involved. It’s amazing what little ones can get into once they become keeping kids safemobile.  You’ll want to make sure you’re taking every precaution to keep your little one’s environment safe.   Trying to decide what to teach about the safety of children can be difficult as all of the topics are important.  Below are a variety of topics, resources and activities that can be used when teaching about safety in your child development classes.  You can pick and choose as your curriculum and time permits.  You could even use the resources to set up mini- stations for students to rotate through to learn even more about children and safety.

PA Standards

  • 11.4.12 B  Analyze current issues in health and safety affecting children at each stage of child development.
  • 11.4.12 C  Analyze practices that optimize child development (e.g., stimulation, safe environment, nurturing caregivers, reading to children),

Overall Safety

  • Create a bag of child safety devices such as outlet covers, empty toilet paper tubes, corner covers, door knob covers, cabinet locks, appliance straps, etc. and give a bag of these goodies to small groups of students.  Have them brainstorm what the items are, what their functions are and also see what they can add to the list.  Discuss why parents often use these products?
  • To give a complete overview of safety with children I like to use the DVD “Safe from the Start” from Amazon along with these Safety video questions
  • Create a SAFETY PAGE PROJECT based on a randomly selected hazard.  Safety Tip Page can be hand drawn or computer generated but must be informative, creative and in color.
  • 23 Incredibly Helpful Diagrams for Moms-To-Be many related to child safety (scroll down through the list)

Car Safety

  • Use this YouTube clip called One Decision Child Safety Film Vehicular Heatstroke to help students understand the dangers of locking children in a car especially on a hot day.  You could possibly have students write a reaction paper type response to this video after watching and before discussing.
  • New car laws article from Consumer Report Magazine many relating to child safety laws.
  • Invite your local police into discuss and demonstrate proper car seat safety and installation.  Many offer free community programs for parents to stop by and have their car seat installation checked out.

Playground Safety

Toy Safety

  • Have students log onto Consumer Product Safety Commission and complete a search for a recalled toy.  Go to the CPSC icon and type toys into the search.  Select any toy of your choice and complete the following questions:
    1. What toy is being recalled?
    2. Why has this toy been recalled?  What are the dangers associated with this toy?
    3. How do consumers take care of this problem?  Do they take the product back to the store?  Do they need to call someone?

    Discuss Conclusion:  Reflection

    We’re you surprised by the number of toy recalls?  We’re you surprised by the toys that were being recalled?  Do we hear about all toys that are being recalled?  What can we do to protect ourselves?

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