According to the MultiSport study, 88 percent parents of school-age children believe that the ideal holidays are those that provide children with plenty of opportunities to exercise and be physically active.
– This year’s winter especially encourages spending time outdoors. It should be remembered that snowy and frosty weather not only brings fun on sleighs or ice skates, but also carries additional dangers – icing, frozen water reservoirs, limited visibility, which are worth talking to children about – emphasizes Natalia Perlińska, spokeswoman for the MultiSport Foundation.
Ice
One of the most serious winter threats remains frozen lakes and ponds, which, despite warnings from the services for years, are still a temptation to play.
— Ice is never predictable — even when it looks stable. Its thickness changes from hour to hour, there are floods and cracks that cannot be seen from the shore. Every year we encounter situations where children treat a frozen body of water as a natural slide – and this is when the most tragic events occur. Water bodies that are now covered with ice can be found both in city parks and outside the city. Rivers are also freezing. All of them are equally dangerous and all of them are subject to the same absolute ban on entering the emerging ice, says Maciej Błasiak, president of the Volunteer Water Rescue Service.
Drug
Not only water bodies become dangerous – difficult road conditions, icy sidewalks, quickly falling darkness – this is a mixture that requires caution.
Experts emphasize that children should know how to behave after a fall on an icy sidewalk or a serious crash on a sledding hill if the injuries are more serious. They should be aware that the quickly falling darkness and slippery roads require not only more caution from drivers, but also from pedestrians – that is why it is so important to wear reflectors, cross the road only in designated places and take careful steps.
– Most winter interventions concern seemingly ordinary situations that suddenly get out of control. The child runs across the icy road or sleds towards the road. This is not a matter of bad will, but of lack of awareness. From the perspective of adults, safety rules in such situations are obvious, but not from the perspective of a child who is still learning cause-and-effect thinking. That’s why it’s worth talking to children, teaching them appropriate behavior, and showing them places that provide safe conditions for winter fun, says Senior Brig. Karol Kierzkowski, press spokesman for the Commander-in-Chief of the State Fire Service.
How to talk to children about safety in winter?
– It is not enough to give children a list of threats and prohibitions. It is necessary to understand the mechanisms and strengthen cause-and-effect thinking. Children who know where the threats come from make more conscious decisions – suggests Ilona Gregorczyk, a sensory integration therapist and expert in the MultiSafety program created by the MultiSport Foundation.
To support parents and teachers in building safety awareness, the MultiSport Foundation has created a free, publicly available MultiSafety educational program. The program includes 7 “lessons” about safety, including the latest winter educational materials in the form of lesson plans, presentations, diagrams of engaging games and puzzles that focus on explaining dangerous situations, develop cause-and-effect thinking and teach children decision-making mechanisms. The materials created as part of the program do not refer to prohibitions, but through the prism of children’s experiences and explaining specific processes, they help them better understand dangerous situations and reinforce appropriate behavior. Educational materials have been developed for children aged 10-14 and are available on the website www.multibezpieczenstwo.pl.
The MultiSafety program has been operating in schools for over a year and is intensively used by teachers.
— 91% of teachers rated the program as very useful in their daily work. Most often, they point to modules on winter, road traffic and safety in…
home. They also emphasize that the materials can be used “step by step”, but they can also be used to compose your own thematic blocks, for example by combining modules about water, nature and sports spaces. The fact that so far 11,479 students have participated in MultiSafety lessons shows that the program supports education not only practically, but also flexibly – also in areas that are less obvious and more difficult to explain – says Natalia Perlińska, spokeswoman for the MultiSport Foundation.
Teachers who conduct classes using the program materials can obtain a personal certificate confirming the implementation of an innovative educational program at school. The certificate is issued after completing a short evaluation form at: www.multibezpieczenstwo.pl/ewaluacja/.
The MultiSafety program is under the patronage of: the Volunteer Water Rescue Service (WOPR), the Police, the State Fire Service and the Education Development Center.
