Activity 1: Coming to help!

Activity type: Imagination

Skills: Foundational literacy, Problem-solving

Outcome: Outcome 4: Children Are Confident And Involved Learners - Children develop a range of learning and thinking skills and processes such as problem-solving, inquiry, experimentation, hypothesising, researching and investigating.

Resources:

emergency vehicle toys (ambulance, police, SES, fire trucks)
toy figures for role-play
phones (old phones that no longer work are best but toy phones work too!)
floor mat with roads marked (or draw a road map on large butcher's paper with roads, houses and shops marked in, and join a few together to create a floor map).

Activity Description

Children explore how people travel in special vehicles to help us. The children pretend to call in an emergency (using the old phones) and send a toy vehicle to help. In this role-playing adventure, children build an understanding of how we let emergency services know we need help and how they get to us to help.

Activity Set Up

Set up the road mat or paper map on the floor. Place the cars and people around the map in different places/situations. Have the phones nearby. You could also have dress-up hats (fire, police, etc.) to add to their imaginative play.

Activity 2: Caring for us

Activity type: Imagination

Skills: Foundational literacy, Social-emotional learning

Outcome: Outcome 1: Children Have A Strong Sense Of Identity - Children learn to interact in relation to others with care, empathy and respect.

Resources:

dress-up clothes for emergency workers, vets, doctors, nurses or others
coloured material to make costumes
pretend play equipment, i.e. any type of emergency services items like stethoscopes, gloves, hard hats, bandages, walky-talkies/radios, safety glasses, tools, bags, etc
dolls to be patients or to be rescued.

Activity Description

In this activity, children have the opportunity to role-play situations where they can provide care. Children can think about who takes on different roles in emergency situations and how different people can help or might need help.

Activity Set Up

Set up a large area where the children can play dress-ups and pretend. Have the dress-ups, dolls, and pretend equipment set up. You might like to choose some outfits to lay out ready to go! You could extend this activity by including a cardboard box decorated like an ambulance/police car/fire engine.

Activity 3: Build a vehicle

Activity type: Busy hands

Skills: Social-emotional learning, Foundational literacy

Outcome: Outcome 2: Children Are Connected With And Contribute To Their World - Children develop a sense of connectedness to groups and communities and an understanding of their reciprocal rights and responsibilities as active and informed citizens.

Resources:

emergency vehicle sheets
scissors
glue sticks
colouring in materials

Activity Description

Children practise fine motor skills as they colour in, cut out and glue on the different parts of the emergency vehicles. Children can talk about the purposes of the different vehicles and where you might see them. They can talk about the different parts of the vehicles, what they are used for and where they should go.

Activity Set Up

Set up a table and chairs, with the colouring in materials, scissors, glue sticks and printouts on the table. You could add photographs or picture books about emergency vehicles nearby for reference.

Activity 4: Match the helpers

Activity type: Quiet time

Skills: Foundational literacy

Outcome: Outcome 4: Children are confident and involved learners - Children transfer and adapt what they have learned from one context to another.

Resources:

matching card set (you can print, cut and laminate this set for future re-use!)

Activity Description

Children match the letters with the first letter of the word. To help children, you might like to colour the cards in matching colours (e.g. A: ambulance blue, B: bandage green, etc). This activity lets children build their familiarity with capital letters by matching the letter with the word's first letter. Children can look at the icons and think about the letters' sounds to match the words.

Activity Set Up

Print, cut out and laminate the matching cards. Put the letter cards in one container and the word cards in another container. You might like to put one set together (e.g. A and Ambulance) to help scaffold the activity. Make sure the surface you have is large enough for the children to spread out and explore with the cards.

Activity 5: Wildlife helpers

Activity type: Nature time

Skills: Social-emotional learning

Outcome: Outcome 2: Children Are Connected With And Contribute To Their World - Children become socially responsible and show respect for the environment.

Resources:

hi-vis vests
clipboards, pens and wildlife check-in sheets
soft animal toys (as patients)
cardboard boxes, with a towel or blanket inside for rescue boxes
bandages
animal food.

Activity Description

Children take on the role of wildlife rescuers and carers, collecting animals in boxes, providing first-aid care and releasing the healthy animals back into the wild. They can think about situations where animals would need to be rescued compared to when they could be left alone. They can think about how they would need to collect animals, what their injuries could be and what sort of care they might need before they can be released back into the wild.

Activity Set Up

Set up an area with the rescue centre and another with animals to be rescued. If you are setting this activity up outside you could tuck the animals under bushes and in trees in the garden. If you are setting it up inside you could have animals that have managed to get stuck inside and are climbing shelves or hiding under chairs.

In the rescue centre set up the wildlife boxes with a towel or blanket inside and a clipboard with an animal rescue card and a pen. Hang up the hi-vis vests (animals often have to be rescued from the side of the road and these are important to have!)

Also, set up rescue pens (cardboard boxes work well) with food and water bowls. Have a table with bandages, syringes (toys or children's medication syringes are great!) and animal food (pretend food or real gum leaves/grass, etc).

First aid items have use-by dates and need to be replaced even when they haven’t been used. You can reach out to the health and safety officers of local businesses or schools and ask them to set aside unused and expired first aid supplies for pretend play.

Activity 6: Fight the fire!

Activity type: Moving bodies

Skills: Social-emotional learning, problem-solving

Outcome: Outcome 3: Children Have A Strong Sense Of Wellbeing - Children become strong in their physical learning and wellbeing.

Resources:

obstacle course (climbing frames, balance beams, jumping hoops, crawling tunnels, etc)
buckets with pretend water
pretend fire.

Activity Description

Let’s put out the fire! Children work to negotiate the obstacle course and carry a bucket of water from the start of the course to the end to help put out the fire.

Activity Set Up

Set up an obstacle course with a number of different elements. You might include hoops for jumping, climbing frames and tunnels for crawling. At the start of the obstacle course, set up a collection of buckets filled with ‘water’. You could use blue cellophane, blue fabric, or for a trickier course, blue blocks or balls that could spill out of the bucket. If it is a hot day and water play is an option at your centre, you could even use real water! At the end of the course, set up your ‘fire’. A box with red and orange cellophane would do nicely! Make sure there is something that the children can put their water into when they reach the end of the course.

To add to the role-playing, you could include firefighter hats at the start of the course.

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