Road to Safety

After seeing wonderful morning and afternoon star of the week presentations we begin our discussion about safety and transportation.  We combine these two themes together this week to allow for discussions about road safety, police officers, and firefighters. We will be talking more about police officers and firefighters in our careers week later in the year but preschoolers love learning about them and we used this opportunity to teach them a little bit about fire safety and stranger danger.

We built a fire engine together as a class by following directions and looking for numbers as a math activity.  Color by numbers allows children to recognize certain numbers and match the correct color to create the same image. Many of the preschoolers found it a challenge to locate all of the numbers which is why activities like this are fun to do, moreover they're easy for parents to do at home as well.

 We played safety BINGO and used images associated with police and fire departments; sometimes a child might need to find the smoke detector image or the fire hydrant image.

 This week both in the morning and afternoon preschoolers learned about fire safety by talking about lighters and candles. We reinforced the rule that if a child sees a candle or lighter at home they are not supposed to pick it up but are supposed to get an adult to remove the item. We then talked about how much fire loves air and the process of stop drop and roll. 

The children learned about this concept by lighting candles and placing different sized bases over them. As the candle burns it uses up the oxygen trapped underneath and the flame eventually goes out. The children were great scientists and guessed which size vase would last the longest, the small, the medium, or the large. 

To work on fine motor skills in the afternoon we ripped up papers to represent the colors of fire and glued them onto the numbers 911 so the children have a better idea of when they are supposed to dial 911. We also learned from our building police officer that if you have a cell phone and not a landline and your child does not know your address it may take longer for the police to find you.  This is important information for parents to have to explain why their children need to learn their address sooner rather than later.

We discussed the shape and colors and sizes of fire and then the children in the afternoon preschool used red to yellow and orange paints to create flames on paper using their handprint to make the fire growing on their page and how they would leave a building if it was on fire.

 To talk about traffic safety we focused a lot on street lights and the signals of the red, yellow, and green lights. We played a lot of games this week like red light, green light, yellow light to help the children better understand the rules of the road with regards to traffic lights.  Sometimes the children would rip up paper in these colors and place them in the correct order and other times they would paint mixing blue and yellow paint together to create the green light etc. 

We repeated talking about traffic lights this week and did a lot of similar activities to reinforce this concept. At the start of the week typically only 2 to 3 preschoolers could answer our questions about traffic lights and crosswalks but by the end of the week children knew when they can walk and when they cannot at a crosswalk and when the car should drive versus stop at a stoplight.  We also learned concepts besides stop drop and roll like stay low and go. We used the sheet to represent smoke and had the preschoolers practice saying below the smoke to get out in case of a fire.

When it comes to transportation the teachers built a car wash for the preschoolers to crawl through.  A lot of children are afraid to go in a real carwash so this helps them understand the parts of the carwash and that each phase has a job to do. We had raindrops hanging to represent the rinse cycle and scrubbers made from actual car washing tools to represent the portion of the carwash that rubs the dirt off of the car. Many of the children asked to go through it multiple times, it was definitely a success!

While some children went through the car wash others played bean bag match up for some large motor activity this week. They threw beanbags onto the correct color to work on their hand eye coordination.

While other children played a transportation role playing game by acting as airplanes and helicopters, motorcycles and people using their feet to to walk from one place to another. 

This week we also worked on a variety of games on the iPads. Some included dressing a firefighter in his complete uniform to work on talking about how different a firefighter looks once dressed in complete uniform while others talked about car maintenance and keeping the car clean or fixing a broken engine or replacing a flat tire.  Others talked about seek and find to look for police or fire safety equipment.

We made a safety helmets this week decorating them in a variety of police and fire safety stickers for fine motor skills.  The children had a lot of fun working construction and keeping people safe in the classroom after they decorated their helmets.

 We worked on vocabulary this week matching up words on a the images the children could identify. We pretended to be firefighters by shooting water at flames in a bucket with numbers written on them. If the number was four the child spray four times on that flame before passing the water bottles the next person.

We practiced putting out a lot of fires this week using shaving cream and paint to represent fire and smoke while the children sprayed water to fan the flames and melt away the fire on buildings.

We also built police cars using a variety of shapes and steps as a class and then read a safety poem highlighting certain letters to improve reading skills and letter recognition.

 The children practiced putting out fire that was decorated on cups by throwing blue beanbags and kicking a blue ball to represent the water needed to put out the fire. This worked hand-eye coordination and eye-foot coordination to help us evaluate each child's throwing and kicking skills.

We read a lot of books this week about crossing guards and police officers and firefighters. We learned about the 24 hours a day that firefighters and police officers protect us and keep us safe even when we are asleep. This seems to help the children understand how hard these people work for all of us every day.

We worked on some color matching and did a variety of games this week having the children race to sort items by the three colors in a traffic light.  The children had the challenge amped up by having them only find five of each color and place 5 in the circles that matched the correct color. This was great for our future kindergarten students as it tested multiple skills at the same time, counting and sorting.

This week we made firefighters on paper using our hands and paint as well as our hands and ink pads. We talked about how firefighters need to work as a team to save people then we used our five fingers on the stamp pad and glued five firefighter hats to the top of each finger to represent a team of firefighters going to save the day.  This was a terrific week.

What's Coming Up?

This coming week is going to be focusing on places all around the world.  However, we are hoping to have a special visit on Monday from the fire department to show off the fire fighter uniform and teach the children how to be brave in emergency situations.

Friday March 10th there will be a choir concert at Palatine High School.  These are usually fun for the children to attend as a family friendly event for anyone interested.  See the PHS website for more details.