When I saw that my oldest Daughter needed to earn a First Aid badge for our church Master Clubs program (similar to Awana) I had a light bulb moment!
I realized First Aid would make a great unit study for all of the kids to do together.
With any unit study I first look through our books to see what I already have on hand. We have several health books as well as many science books so I pulled those off the shelves and went through those taking notes. Second, I make a folder in my favorites and search the internet, saving any appropriate sites I want to look through. Third, I visit the library and add to what I already have. I make notes all the while and plan my “spine” for the study.
I began our unit with The Good Samaritan from Luke 10. To me this exemplified a person with great compassion who administered first aid in such a kind and loving way.
For memorization I made charts of the following:
The four C’s of first aid:
*confidence
*common sense
*compassion
*comfort
We learned “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver” Proverbs 25:11 because this drives home the point that showing common sense and words of comfort to a person in distress is very important.
We also memorized the ABC’s of good first aid:
*Airway open
*Breathing independently
*Circulation controlled
The definition of first aid:
“the emergency care given to a person who is injured or suddenly becomes ill”
With first aid the topics could be endless so I narrowed down what I wanted to cover:
Bleeding; fractures-simple and compound; strains and sprains; fainting; and burns-first, second, and third degree.
We covered how to help someone in those situations and appropriate procedures.
The children had a great time improvising and making splints out of items they could find around the house.
Our vocabulary words:
fracture
simple fracture
compound fracture
splint
sprain
strain
RICE- rest, ice, compression, elevation
pressure
elevate
faint
clammy
wound
laceration
stitches
I knew that I wanted to add a game to our unit so I made a simple one using a small poster board (11×14). I added questions and “draw a question card” to the blanks that I made using a ruler. After that I simply put questions on the fronts of small index cards that I had stashed with the answers on the back and I placed them in a small envelope that I glued to my game board. We used a dice and water bottle tops as tokens (of course many things would work for this.)
We also put together a first aid binder to have on hand for review any time we need it.
Here are a few links we used to help in our study:
Scouting Web First Aid
First Aid Coloring Book-For younger students
Mini First Aid Kits-we did not make these but it looks good
Teaching First Aid to Kids
First Aid Games
After all was said and done the kids learned a lot. Hopefully they’ll remember it-if and when the time comes they ever need to use it!
Rhonda is a homeschool Mom to 3 and you can visit her over at Living Water Christian Academy
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I love your idea of a game to teach first aid. My 2 boys would create board-type games all the time just for fun, but never thought to use them to teach. (duh) Have one still at home that I can use this idea on, tho! Great post.
Thank you, Deb-I like making up games to help my kids review material.
And thank you Tracy for posting my First Aid unit study!!
What an awesome article! I especially like the recommendation of using the 5 senses for writing about nature-excellent idea.