Working with children?

Question

I am at college studying Child Care and have to get thses things called PERS signed off once we have done them.

I am stuck on ideas for these two:

1) Provide activities to encourage children's awareness of their own and other's safety

2) Plan, provide and review activities/experiences which promote the personal health of the child, which avoid bias and take account of any cultural or social factors.

Please can you give me ideas for both for two different age ranges: 2-4 years and 4-5 years.

Thank you

Answer 1

1)  Talk about safety at home: hot stoves, electrical outlets, objects that could fall, crossing streets, playing near the road, etc.  Read a story, color some pictures, etc.  Then make everyone 'safety officers'.  Give them badges to wear home.  Tell them to go home and look for dangerous things.  They are officers and should help mom and dad make the house safe.  

OR

Talk about fire safety, have a fire drill

Tornado safety and have a tornado drill

2) Dental health.  You can get children's toothbrushes for a little bit of nothing at dollar stores.  You could also have a dentist come talk to them and they will normally hand out toothbrushes and floss.  We just did that in kindergarten and they loved it.  Talk about ways to keep our teeth healthy, good foods to eat, how to brush.  Count your teeth, talk about losing baby teeth and growing big teeth.

Answer 2

Have you ever seen the cartoon on Disney channel where lou and lou are the "Safety Patrol?"  It come on in the am around here it is just one of those that is on inbetween shows.  But anyway, the premise of it is that these 2 little kids go around looking for "safety violations" and then tell people what and why they have a violation.  For example, leaving the room when you have a stove on the pot, plugging to many things into an outlet and things like that.  You could have the kids in both age groups look for "safety violations" that you have created in a room and then work together to come up with ideas of how to fix them.

2. Take a water bottle and put some washable paint into it.  Just enough to color the water.  Pick one kid to be "sick" and have them walk around the room sneezing(squeeze the bottle to spray the water everytime they sneeze) older kids will really enjoy squeezing the bottle and being the helper.  Then ask kids to touch some of the things that the sick kid touched.  Then have they put their hands on a white sheet of paper.  They will be able to see the colored water from the kid who sneezed.  You can use this to talk about why it is important to wash our hands and to not come to daycare when we are sick.  You could further expand on it by teaching them how to sneeze into their elbow, which will keep from getting the germs on their hands and spreading them all over too.