Aim: To Highlight the importance of wearing a seat belt and sitting in a child seat.
Objectives:
- What happens if we don’t wear a seat belt or sit in a child seat.
- To understand why you should stay in a child seat until you are big enough to use an adult seat belt.
- Know how to put a seat belt on correctly.
You: Find a toy car that Is big enough to place a small teddy bear in it. If you don’t have a toy car or one big enough, perhaps have a go together at making a toy car with your child out of things like paper and cardboard. Here is a link to YouTube with a video that can give you some ideas you can adapt to make one. However, anything with wheels that you can strap a teddy in is fine. Find something like a heavy book to roll the car into.
Your Child/ren: Roll the car with a teddy in along the floor or a table so it hits an object, like the heavy book at the end. When teddy is thrown forward, discuss what you could do to make sure he stays safe in his seat. Tie teddy down with something like ribbon or perhaps string and repeat the exercise. What do they think will happen if people don’t wear their seat belt, explain if people don’t wear a seat belt they can get hurt. When the car suddenly stops, just like in the experiment, a person is thrown from their seat and will keep going until they hit something that will stop them. This is usually something hard, and when hard things hit us, it hurts. They should understand terms like hard and soft, but if there is any confusion, use a hard backed book and a cushion or pillow to demonstrate the difference.
You: Find a tape measure, sellotape, colouring pencil, scissors. Find an image of a skeleton and organs of the body follow this link for some images.
Joint activities: Explain that seat belts are made for people who are 1.5m in height. If you are lot smaller than this the adult seat belt won’t fit you properly.
Measure the height of you and your child, make a note of this. Use a wall or a door and stick three pieces of paper on the wall or door, one for marking your height, a second to mark out 1.5 metres and the third to mark the height your child. Explain that when someone is smaller than 1.5 metres the adult seat belt doesn’t fit you correctly and the straps lie over the wrong parts of your body.
An adult seat belt should rest against the hard bony parts of your body that protect soft organs inside your body. Have a look at the pictures of parts of the body and see the organs that would be affected if you wear it incorrectly. The diagonal part should rest against the collar bone, breast bone and hip bone. The lap part should be resting of the lap not the stomach and pulled so there is no slack.
Make a poster to put up on the bedroom wall based on what you have learnt.
If you like singing follow this link with a seat belt song to learn and listen to.