Take a look at this fantastic video from Alexander, who is 15 and attends Flexible Childcare Services Aberdeenshire’s Peterhead ASN Group.
Our ASN Manager, Naomi, and her team were keen for the children to learn the importance of safety so that they could reduce the risk of incidents when taking outings and trips.
The team linked their floor book to the Care Inspectorate‘s Health and Social Care Standards and the children added their own artwork and wrote words that they related to safety and what activities may be unsafe.
Rather than making pictures, Alexander, who loves art and animation, chose to make the video to help the rest of the group understand the importance of safety. He made his own plasticine elephants and developed a story using stop animation where the bigger elephant rescues the little elephant from risky play and then how they worked together to keep themselves safe.
The animation, added to paper resources and the team’s indepth knowledge of SIMOA, allowed the children to implement these learnings in a real-life situation when they went on a community outing using public transport.
They followed SIMOA by wearing seatbelts, looking both ways and listening to an adult before crossing the road. Head counts were carried out multiple times during the outing to ensure everyone was safe and no one was lost.
Activities like this give the children the freedom and autonomy to express their own interests and ideas, leading to enhanced learning opportunities which benefit the entire group as well as the team who support them.
At FCSS we believe that giving children the opportunity to implement their own ideas provides opportunities for children to collaborate, communicate, and negotiate with others. This helps develop their social skills, such as sharing, taking turns, and working cooperatively, as well as their emotional skills, such as empathy and self-awareness.
For more information on how we support children with ASN please visit our Additional Support Needs page.
