Child Safety Week is an initiative of Child Accident Prevention Trust (CAPT). It aims to raise awareness of risks of child accidents and how to prevent it. This year, it will hold between 3rd and 9th of June. The theme is “Family life today: where’s the risk?” With globalisation and advances in technology, there are more risks to child safety today. Therefore we ought to prepare for it and not wait for something to happen first. Knowledge empowers so I am an advocate for equipping the child early so they can protect themselves from harm. Every parent, aunt, uncle, educator, school owner, child minder needs to think of how to do this in an interesting way.
Here are some options:
1) Q & A sessions: Identify a particular area on child safety you want to teach the child and prepare questions on it. Ask the child, gauge their responses to see why they answered in a certain way and teach the correct thing if they do not know. Make it fun and interesting
2) Story book reading: Stories have proven to be an effective way to pass knowledge to children. Whenever I read my child safety book, #TheAdventuresOfMuna with children, it always leads to a robust conversation. You can get book copies and also SafeVille a comic by Barr Taiwo Akinlami the children will learn whilst being entertained
3) Mini Presentation: Give the child a topic to research on and present their findings to a group. Most times when people find out something for themselves, they never forget.
4) Drama/Role Play: Methods of teaching which use creative or entertaining tools are always a winner with children. They could act out a little skit of someone bumping into a wall due to fixation on a mobile device or a child being kidnapped because he or she accepted something from a stranger etc.
5) Songs: This is perfect for smaller children. Songs that are catchy and easy to learn will keep the safety message top of mind
Which of these ideas will you be implementing with your children at home or students in school? I would love to see what you do. You can share with the hashtag #ChildSafetyWeekNG
