The purpose of this study was to investigate current conditions of safety education for young children and teachers' needs on a safety education program in childcare centers. For this study, 274 teachers working for childcare centers responded to the ...
The purpose of this study was to investigate current conditions of safety education for young children and teachers' needs on a safety education program in childcare centers. For this study, 274 teachers working for childcare centers responded to the questionnaire developed by the researcher. The results of this study were as follows:
1. Most of respondents had experienced children's injuries more than once while on duty. 74% of 274 teachers had experienced only trivial injuries undergone medical treatment for one week below and 7.5% had experienced serious injuries undergone medical treatment for three weeks and over.
2. 53.4% of respondents answered that their childcare centers had a safety education program for young children. 38.4% of respondents had given safety education to young children once a month, 19.6% once a week, and 7.8% everyday. In general, respondents did not feel comfortable instructing young children in safety education because of their lack of safety knowledge(48.5%), insufficiency of teaching materials for safety education (30.7%). and their shortage of time available(19.7%).
3. Most respondents recognized the importance and the necessity of teaching materials for safety education, and preferred above all teaching materials composed of safety activities(60.9%) mainly relating to play safety, traffic safety, first aid, and fire drill.
The conclusions drawn from the present study were as follows:
l. A safety education program for young children should be developed in the context of the stage of development and ages between 2 and 6.
2. Teaching materials for safety education should be composed of various sorts of risks from the environment and ways of protection from injuries. And it should be possible that the teaching materials help young children manage various sorts of risks appropriately in their surroundings.
3. Major teaching materials for safety education should be headed for practice but theory. They should be concerned with characteristics of young children's behaviors. the types of young children's injuries, knowledge related to safety theories, effective safety guidances, teachers' and parents' roles of preventing danger, and the methods of safety education through play.
4. The most successful teaching materials for safety education would be concrete guidelines including worksheets for activities. Manuals, video tapes, and CD-Roms for safety education would be excellent among assistant teaching materials.
5. We should include ways of preventing injuries and strategies coping with injury factors of play, traffic, fire, fall to the surface, cutting, food, electricity, gas, collapse, and etc. in teaching contents for safety education. Also, teaching contents for safety education should cover disasters such as typhoon, deluge, earthquake, and wars.