We have been homeschooling our daughter and this month’s theme is all about safety and emergencies. Our daughter loves art and we love to mix fun activities into our lessons, so we decided to make this Safety Vehicles Paint Kit. It is the perfect addition to spark creativity while creating engagement in your lesson.
Benefits of Hands On Learning
Solely reading books and doing worksheets for class can be quite boring and under-stimulating. Hands on learning is necessary to provide well rounded education and keep your learners engaged and focused. When a child is engaged in their learning, it leads to better retention and a desire to learn.
When a child engages in a learning activity that involves multi-tasking, for example talking and painting, it increases the opportunities for both sides of the brain to be stimulated and develop. This is critical as the right side of the brain, which is known as the creative side, develops first, when children are around four years old. The left side of the brain, known as the logical side, does not develop until years later, between seven and ten years old. Providing activities which cause them to use their right side of the brain while keeping them engaged through creative exercises will lead to better experiences with learning and therefore an interest in learning. You will be able to grow their analytical and language skills while expanding their personal creativity.
How to Incorporate the Safety Vehicles Paint Kit into Your Lessons
One of our most loved ways to incorporate hands on activities with out lessons is with books. Each day we read a book related to our theme of the day. Most of the books we read are either from the library or Usborne Books & More, since I am a representative. Our daughter absolutely loves the flap books, so I knew “Peek Inside How a Fire Truck Works” was going to the perfect book for our fire safety day. The lift-the-flap books keep her engaged since she has to listen to the content, then lift the flap to keep the story progressing.
As our daughter paints the fire truck, I leaf through the book again and we talk about things we read. This both helps test her knowledge and better retain information she may have missed the first time. Depending on the book, I may read the whole story to her while she is painting. The simple act of doing something with her hands (sparking the right side of her brain) and listening to the story (sparking the left side of her brain) helps provide that well-rounded lesson that develops her brain more efficiently. You can get your safety vehicles paint kit here. It comes with a wooden ambulance, police car, and fire truck to paint, as well as six paints and one paintbrush.
Additional Safety Lesson Resources
Some other books you may like to include in your Safety Unit are “Dial 911”, “Be Careful and Stay Safe”, “How Do Dinosaurs Stay Safe?”, “I Won’t Go With Strangers”, and “Once Upon a Dragon: Stranger Safety for Kids.” I was able to find all of these books at my local library.
I also made a couple worksheets that we worked on together. One was a visual worksheet pictures to circle which were an emergency. The second was to discuss important information to know in case of an emergency. Since our daughter is also practicing her writing skills, she wrote some of the information herself, but I wrote the longer answers. There is also a shape matching game I made where you look at each safety sign and match which shape it is. You can cut these out on cardstock and laminate them to give them a more sturdy and long-lasting effect.
All of these worksheets I created are available to you for free for download below.
Importance of Safety Units
It is critical that even young children know the safety basics, so make sure you are giving them small tidbits of information when you can. It can be as simple as acknowledging stop signs when you are on walks or even acknowledging your street sign and reciting your address. It is easy to fit in this vital information throughout the day without formal, sit at a desk lessons. Be sure they know what qualifies as an emergency and what they should do as an emergency. They need to know who they can turn to for help should you not be there and be able to provide information which identifies who they are and who you are should they be lost.
Happy Learning!
