One of your responsibilities as a parent is to teach your children how to stay safe. Home is often considered a safe place, but your children need to know what dangers they can face in the home and what they can do to prevent accidents from happening. Using a few fun activities will help teach your children important home safety lessons that they will remember if a dangerous situation arises.
Play "What If ..."
"What If ..." games allow you to teach your children about the dangers they face at home and what they can do to stay safe, writes John C. Worzbyt, author of "Teaching Kids to Care and to Be Careful: A Practical Guide for Teachers, Counselors and Parents." Pretend someone is knocking at the front door and have your children act out various scenarios about what they should do. Teach them the correct choice and practice again. Other situations you could practice include someone getting hurt, seeing a fire or believing someone is trying to break into the house.
Safety Hunt
Worzbyt recommends going through the home as a family to find potential dangers and take steps to make the house safer for kids. Make a list of safety issues and challenge each of your children to go through the house and find out whether each issue has been corrected. Challenge them to see if all electrical outlets are covered, if cords are out of reach or if there is anything on stairs that could cause someone to trip. After the hunt, work together to remedy any dangers that your children found. Next, seek out an escape route for everyone in the family, draw it out and have a practice fire drill to make sure the plan works well.
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Family Field Trip
Visit a local fire house or police station and have the firefighters or police officers teach your children about home safety, LauraMaery Gold and Joan M. Zielinski recommend in their book "Homeschool Your Child for Free: More than 1,400 Smart, Effective and Practical Resources for Educating Your Family at Home." Firefighters often give children demonstrations about home safety, including what to do in a fire and how to recognize dangerous substances or things that could cause physical harm. Police officers can teach your children how to avoid many different dangerous situations in the home, as well as some self-defense moves to help empower them to feel safe at home.
