Let’s keep water safety top of mind

Emma Lawrence > Managing Director, Kids Alive

ACA Qld Patron Laurie Lawrence, founder of ‘Kids Alive Do the Five’ Drowning Prevention Campaign, is dedicated to the welfare of Australian children and educating the community on children’s water safety. Water Safety advocate and Managing Director of Kids Alive Emma Lawrence outlines the training program available to early childhood educators and encourages teachers to keep the water safety message alive.

The Royal Lifesaving National Drowning Report 2020 included a promising statistic – that drowning deaths among children aged 0-4 have decreased by 52% compared with the 10-year average. However, we are still tragically losing children to drowning events. In the one-year reporting period during 2019/20, twelve children in Australia aged 0-4 lost their lives to drowning. Swimming pools were the most common location for drowning events but children also drowned in lakes, dams, rivers, creeks, bathtubs and spa baths. Early childhood educators across Australia have an important role to play in helping teach children about water safety. This year Kids Alive is launching a new updated online training program for educators, which has separate components for children aged 0-3 years and 3-5 years. Emma said, “Each module takes 30 minutes to complete and our goal is to have every early childhood educator in Australia complete this training each and every year. We can’t become complacent, as we have seen in the past that drowning statistics in children under 5 jump again

“I’d love to acknowledge the Teaching Team at Bright Buttons Currumbin and Banora Point for developing the lesson plans. Without their help this program would not have been possible.”

New Professional Development Training

The Kids Alive online training shows early childhood educators how to incorporate water safety into lessons, providing a step-by-step guide across four location-themed lesson plans, including Beach, Pool, Farm and Home. Each lesson plan includes:

An Activity Description and Intentional Teaching

Strategy – including fun ways to bring the water safety messages to life through costumes, stories and videos.

Resources – the nitty gritty of what items might be needed for the lesson plan.

Link to National Quality Standards – how the lesson will enhance learning and development, health and physical activity, relationship building and collaborative partnerships.

Learning Outcomes x5 - including how the lesson will benefit identity, connecting, involved learning processes, physical learning and language and literacy.

Extension Ideas – suggested books and other activities to be incorporated following the lesson.

Children’s Ideas & Interests (Spontaneous) – a suggestion to note down ideas that come from the children throughout the lesson.

A snapshot of the Beach lesson plan

Activity: Organise swim safety costumes to come in and help introduce beach safety to the children and discuss who keeps us safe at the beach, signs and symbols to look out for at the beach and things to take to the beach. Organise a teacher to be outside that is not being sun safe. Collaborate with the children and discuss what things the teacher is missing to be sun safe. E.g. - no hat, appropriate clothing for sun play, sun cream, sun glasses, seek shade. Children take these items to the teacher to help them be sun safe. Resources: Kids Alive characters, sun safety resources for children to give the teacher – sunglasses/hat/sun cream/ sun safe shirt, interactive whiteboard with signs and symbols on it. Extension Ideas: Literacy Extensions: No Hat Brigade – Miriam Airey and Sharon Dye/Grandpa and Thomas – Pamela Allen. Other Extension Ideas: Beach safety collage, boat safety, creating the flags, Life Saver community visit, investigate water animals and compare them to land animals (why can they stay under water without drowning), role play unsafe times at the beach e.g. if a child is caught in a rip and what to do.

Kids Alive Resources

The Teachers Hub on the Kids Alive website includes posters, fun music games, songs, books, music videos, animations and safety tip videos that can be used as part of the water safety lessons. Another great resource is the Kids Alive Couch Concert series launched this year due to the restrictions imposed by COVID-19. The series is available on the Kids Alive website and includes book readings, a craft corner, dance routines and puppet shows. These are an easy way to share the water safety message with children. Once again this summer, Kids Alive will distribute over 10,000 free water safety packs to education services registered with the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority. This includes family day care, long day care and outside of school care operators. A further 50,000 packs will also be distributed to schools, home school networks, hospitals, remote education services and swim schools.

Emma is calling on all early childhood Directors to get behind the new Kids Alive training initiative. Emma said, “Our work will not stop until there are zero child drownings and we are constantly seeking new ways to reach children and parents and developing new resources to meet this goal. We know that early, targeted water safety education programs can help save the lives of children under 5. We look forward to seeing more teachers take up the training in 2021.”