Road Safety in Early Education #3: A Framework for Programming and Planning

In this episode of our Road Safety in Early Education mini-series, we explore how to move beyond 'Road Safety Week' and embed life-saving messages into your daily curriculum throuhgout the year. Using high-quality, play-based pedagogy aligned with the EYLF V2.0, we discuss how to use transitions, dramatic play, and children’s spontaneous interests to make road safety a natural part of early learning.

The highlight of the episode is a deep dive into Gilgandra Preschool, where road safety is embedded through First Nations culture. Discover how educators used the Wiradjuri word Girrawaa (goanna) to create a culturally relevant helmet safety rhyme and adapted resources with local Aboriginal artwork. From intentional teaching on bike tracks to using photos of the local neighborhood in the block area... you’ll walk away with practical tips to make road safety education visible, meaningful and culturally respectful in your ECEC service.

Find out more:
https://kidsandtraffic.mq.edu.au/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to Learn Play Thrive the podcast, the ultimate early learning podcast for educators and leaders in the sector. Let's learn, play, and thrive together.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

The Learn Play Thrive podcast was recorded on the land with the dark and young people. We pay our respects to the traditional custodians, past, present, and emerging. Hands out, hands down, clear and dark and jungle.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Welcome back to our Learn Play Thrive miniseries, Road Safety in Early Education. I'm your host, Linda Harrison, and today we are getting into the heart of an early use classroom as we chat about all things programming and planning for road safety education. How do we take the vital Kids and Traffic key road safety messages and weave them into the EYLF, our daily rhythms and routines, and our intentional teaching? So joining me once again are Amanda Menzies and Beck Dunn from Kids and Traffic. Welcome back, ladies. Hi Linda.

SPEAKER_03 0:57

Today is all about making road safety visible in your early education curriculum.

SPEAKER_04 1:02

Hey everyone. I'm really excited to talk about how we can be creative with our planning while keeping the key road safety messages front and centre.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

So let's start with the how. Some educators might think they need to stop everything and do a road safety lesson, or they might organise for a police officer to visit and talk with the children. But kids in traffic, uh, your early education road safety framework advocates for something different.

SPEAKER_03 1:29

It does, Linda. Effective road safety education is based on the foundations of high-quality early education. This means it should be hands-on, play-based, child-centered, and involve your families. It's about cross-curriculum integrated learning.

SPEAKER_02 1:45

So I think integrated is that key word there. And that's where we're looking for ways to embed road safety in places that we're already planning for through play-based learning across the whole early childhood curriculum. Is that the gist?

SPEAKER_04 2:00

Yes, precisely. We really want to embed that road safety education into those daily teaching routines, transitions, looking at the children's interests and our interactions with them. It really helps for children to develop their understandings of how to keep safe in a way that feels relevant and meaningful to them. We need to make sure we always keep that golden rule in mind. We need to engage our young children in learning about ways to keep safe when out and about without making them responsible for their own safety. That is why involving families is so crucial.

SPEAKER_02 2:34

And I think that part of that planning is being continuous. So we're not just planning for a road safety week and ticking a box, are we?

SPEAKER_03 2:42

No, it needs to be on an ongoing focus. For us, road safety week is every week. It's looking for those opportunities to consistently use the kids and traffic key road safety messages through teaching and learning, our spontaneous experiences, and daily routines and transitions. It's important to, however, ensure our road safety is contextualized and relevant. So remembering to tailor planning and programming to specific concerns and challenges affecting families in our local communities.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

And I love seeing how programming for road safety education looks like in practice. So I've noticed on the Kids in Traffic website there are some stories from services about how they've implemented road safety. And the Gilgandra Preschool one jumped out at me. So could you tell us a bit about their implementation of road safety and how they made it relevant to community and culture?

SPEAKER_04 3:35

Well, for what started with Gilgandra Preschool as a workshop and those conversations about safe riding, it led to one part of the implementation to the development of a personalised rhyme and video story with the five little Girowa. Girowa being the Wadjari word for Gowanna. They took a familiar resource, being the kids in traffic version of the five little monkeys, and they adapted it to share the safe play messages of always wear your helmet with children and families. They wanted to make the road safety learning culturally relevant as well.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

And I'm keen to find out how did they blend that road safety message with the Aboriginal culture?

SPEAKER_03 4:11

So it really became a collaboration between our team at Kids in Traffic and the educators and children at the preschool. And then in consultation with local Aboriginal elders and the preschool families, the Girowa, which is the spiritual totem of the Warajari people, was chosen to replace those monkeys. Warajari language was used in the adaptation of the rhyme, and the painting of the Giro was chosen for the imagery of the video story too.

SPEAKER_04 4:38

And just the rhyme provides the opportunity to link cross-curriculum to early numeracy as well through that counting, making connections between that quantity, number, numerals, all while the children engaging in safe writing conversations.

SPEAKER_02 4:53

It sounds like a wonderfully rich, meaningful uh road safety, I guess, set of learning experiences there that were implemented over time. And I've actually been to that preschool myself, and I I remember they have a really wonderful, it's quite big there, their bike track. So I would imagine that rhyme would help support that safe riding at the preschool too.

SPEAKER_04 5:14

Absolutely. It's a great reminder of safe riding at preschool, but also a great way of engaging families in conversation about safe places to ride at home and out and about and in the local area as well. As the importance of always wearing a correctly fitted helmet and making sure that we're in a safe place away from the traffic environment to ride.

SPEAKER_02 5:34

And I was keen to actually just ask a side question around correctly fitting a helmet. Are there some tips that educators could keep in mind for that?

SPEAKER_03 5:42

So grown-ups can ask children to use their pointer finger and their middle finger, place these above their eyebrow, and the helmet should then be positioned so that it sits just on top of their finger. That might be hard for you to visualize, but you could look on our website, there's visuals of how you can measure this.

SPEAKER_04 5:59

And just also making sure that the strap is fitted correctly over their ears as well. We know that if the um helmet is not positioned correctly and it's over their eyes, they lose that visibility and being able to ride safely. And if it's too far back, it exposes their forehead. So making sure the helmet is in that correct position using that two-finger rule that Amanda mentioned, it's going to best protect their brains if there is um a fall.

SPEAKER_02 6:23

It's so important, and I think uh even if services don't have bikes and wheel toys, they could embed their helmets in their pretend play where children could still practice um buckling up their helmet and fitting it correctly, couldn't they? Most definitely.

SPEAKER_03 6:36

And even talking about all those people that they know or that they've seen in their local community that wear helmets as well. They can be great people to um, you know, influence children into that behaviour as well.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

Of course, they're a famous cricket player or someone they look up to in sport or even just the local fiery who has to wear a helmet when they're you know out fighting fires.

SPEAKER_03 6:59

Or the posty delivering our mail.

SPEAKER_02 7:02

Well, I think uh from all those ideas you've shared today, it really shows us, and especially the Gilgandra one, showing us that programming for road safety isn't extra work for educators. You know, it can be embedded across the curriculum regularly through play, using those key road safety messages. So, do you have some tips for an educator who's perhaps looking at their current programming and wondering where they start?

SPEAKER_03 7:28

Well, we've worked with many services over the years who've found creative ways of bringing road safety into their program, their discussions and partnerships with their families. But one of the easiest ways is through daily transitions. Just be creative with them. They aren't always planned learning experiences, but it's effective to have some tools up your sleeve. Think about songs, rhymes, and even dramatic play. They can all be useful. Rather than lining up the children to go outside or to the bathroom to wash their hands, find a way to stagger that transition and embed learning. We've got a number of um road safety songs and rhymes that are countdown type songs, like our five little monkeys, which we mentioned earlier, and our five happy travellers. They all work so well with transitions and engaging children in the road safety messages.

SPEAKER_04 8:19

And just looking at your dramatic play. If children are playing families, give them a doll and a toy car and talk about the safety door. Or encourage children to buckle them up in that pretend car using pretend seatbelts, like the ones in our buckle up safely pack. If you don't have access to these, maybe even just black ribbon. It's about catching those play-based moments, isn't it, Beck? Most definitely. And one of the services we've worked with over a couple of years at Kentos Preschool, they identified through conversations with families and through observation that helmets weren't being worn consistently or being worn correctly with children when they were riding. And one part of a larger project saw children creating helmets for their teddies and other small toys animals so they would be safe when riding during the dramatic play. I think one that we most enjoyed looking at, they had a kangaroo with a joey in its pouch. And they had to consider what size helmet the Joey would have compared to the adult kangaroo. So really starting that conversation of what is the best sized helmet that we need to wear, and it's going to be different to the grown-ups in our lives as well.

SPEAKER_03 9:24

So another cross-curriculum experience to engage children and families about helmet wearing and the importance of a correctly fitted helmet. And I think through that size experience with the toys, it emphasises to families as well that their child needs to have the right sized helmet and a correctly fitted one than when they're riding.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

And I guess they could use a lot of uh different loose parts for the helmets for those toys. Did they use things like ice cream containers or ice cream containers, bottle top lids?

SPEAKER_04 9:53

I think we had medicine, like little medicine containers. And then they had to make the strap. So then, especially for some of the um other children, it was that problem solving of how are we going to actually attach the pipe cleaner or the piece of string to make the helmet work as well. And can can we use something that's soft or do we need something that's hard? That's what's going to protect our head best. So the children were starting to look at those scientific elements as well. So really sparking that conversation of what loose parts would be most appropriate as well.

SPEAKER_02 10:25

Lots of trial and error and problem solving happening that helping them develop, I guess, with the EYLF learning outcome, you know, being the confident involved learners, developing those learning dispositions that road safety can support. And I think while we're on the topic of programming around road safety, that educators might sometimes think that it's more for preschool age children. But can road safety be for our babies and toddlers too? 100%.

SPEAKER_04 10:53

Think creatively about how you might use children's interests and the types of developmentally appropriate experiences that you regularly engage in with them and how you could then include that road safety elements.

SPEAKER_03 11:05

Even just last week I was visiting a service. Their focus was engaging the children's experiences around hand holding with their grown-ups, in particular about arrivals and departures, but also those other everyday journeys the families take. With the babies and the toddlers, dramatic play and songs were used while the educators took turns to hold hands with the children. In the two to three-year-old room, the children use small world play, using small people to show how they hold hands with their grown-ups.

SPEAKER_04 11:36

But it's also thinking about how you set up your small world play. Is it set up in a small tray for a small group experience? Is it a table activity that you may want to set up outside by using some of your bigger structures, such as maybe it's the large blocks or using potentially your toy cars if you have those? But thinking about those loose parts experiences. Can we set up blocks as roads? Can we use tissue boxes to make the buildings of our preschool? And thinking about even taking photographs of the children with their grown-ups or the children with their educators, print them out, stick them onto the block or put them on a bullnose clip. So every time the children are engaging in that small world play, they can access them and their grown-ups so they're always then the conversation is around that grown-up being responsible for them, whether they are walking in the car park, whether they are going on an excursion or that evacuation as well.

SPEAKER_03 12:30

And the preschool room, the educators in there, they had some creative ideas for depicting those stories of how children hold hands and who are the grown-ups that they hold hands with. They used those wooden tessellating um shapes and they created pictures of hand holding. And all of these were these experiences throughout the service were used to create some posters to share the message with families at arrival and departure times.

SPEAKER_04 12:57

I just had another thought that I, something that we did do with our youngest babies. We'd actually got the grown-ups to trace their hand and then trace the baby's hand as well. And it was just a lovely way of connecting the grown-ups with their youngest children in those years where they can't actually draw out or to communicate those messages, but getting the families involved in that way as well.

SPEAKER_02 13:17

So road safety education really can start from a very young age, and it's thank you for sharing those stories. It's so inspiring to see how road safety education in early childhood can be meaningful and relevant, engaging for young children, and also culturally respectful with your beautiful Gilgandra story. So I think listeners, as you're looking at planning this week, a takeaway is to ask yourself how can I include the local community in the road safety program to make it more meaningful and relevant for the young children in your care? And one idea I might just share, um, I remember as an early childhood teacher with preschool age children, was that I used to take some photos of the surrounding uh road traffic environment, so the buildings and the shops, some of the roads, the traffic lights, the red man, green man, uh, even road signs, and then attach them to the wooden blocks in the construction area, or even tissue boxes like you mentioned, Beck, or cardboard boxes. And that provides a really great open-ended opportunity for children and uh I guess more of the older children and educators to engage in conversations about ways that they stay safe when they're visiting their favorite places. So it might be the pool where they go to swimming lessons or the park. Uh, so that's just another idea how you can uh embed road safety in the curriculum. And I think it's a great lead-in into episode four, our next episode, where we'll be exploring language and literacy opportunities for supporting road safety education. So until then, keep playing, keep thriving, and remember that road safety for young children is a community responsibility.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

See you next time. Bye everyone. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Learn Playthrive the podcast. We hope you found inspiration and valuable insights to fuel your journey in early childhood education. Remember the key to fostering learning, promoting play, and empowering young minds lies with your dedication and creativity. Stay connected between episodes by following us on Instagram at learnplaythrive underscore and join the conversation on Facebook at LearnPlaythrive Australia. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please like, subscribe, rate, or review our podcast on your favourite platform. Your feedback helps us to continue to deliver content that resonates with you. And don't forget to visit us at our website at learnplaythrive.com.au for additional resources, blog posts, and professional development opportunities. Until next time, keep learning, keep playing, and keep thriving. We'll see you in the next episode of Learn Playthrive the podcast.