Hellobee

Recently Charlie got separated from his after school program when they went back in the school without him after playing outside on the playground. He was never in any danger, and was with another after school program’s kids and their teachers the entire time. He was a little scared by the whole experience, and our after school program contacted us to let us know what had happened. We weren’t worried, but that did get me thinking about how we’ve prepared Charlie to handle certain emergencies. It’s something that we’ve done pretty casually over the past couple of years, but now that Charlie is older and can fully verbalize his needs, I think we can really go over these skills.

A S K I N G  F O R  H E L P

An important thing we should be teaching Charlie and Olive is to stay put if they become separated because the hardest way to find someone is if you’re both running around. We have to remind them that we will come to find them but if we can’t, then they can ask an adult for help. Since Charlie was 2, I’ve told him that if he ever gets separated from us, he should ask a mom with children for help. Of course a police officer makes sense, but you usually don’t see them around. Our neighborhood is packed with families as are the places we usually frequent, and a mom is probably going to be helpful and know what to do. It’s easy to get separated in crowded places (I recently saw this at the ice skating rink), and we have friends whose kids are runners that take off, so whenever we’d go to a really busy place, I’d ask Charlie what he would do if he got separated from us to make sure he knew what to do. If your child isn’t old enough to verbalize asking for help, you can always do what my mom did when we went to Disneyland – wrote my phone number on the kids’ arms with a pen.

K N O W I N G  O U R  R E A L  N A M E S

Both Charlie and Olive know our full real names. This can be helpful because they can tell adults who their parents are, adults have a real name to call out, or names can be announced on a speaker if one is available.

Mrs. Cowgirl wrote a brilliant post on how to teach your little one to spell their name through song. Charlie learned how to spell his name when he was 2 using that method, as did all our friends’ kids when we told them about it. Then one of our friends came up with the equally brilliant idea to teach her phone number to her daughter using the same method. Charlie has 7 letters in his name so we used the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to teach him how to spell his name, and we used the same tune to teach him my phone number (I taught him the area code separately).

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Charlie first learned about 911 in daycare when he was 3. I’ve heard stories of 3 year olds calling 911 and saving their family’s lives, so I knew that he was old enough to learn. We’ve talked about when we call 911, what happens when we call, and who comes when we call. 911 For Kids has tips and lesson plans on teaching kids how to properly use 911. The only problem is, we don’t have a landline and our cell phones are ever changing locations. In case of an emergency, Charlie would have to find our phones first! Not only that, we haven’t taught him how to make a call on our cell phones yet. He knows how to slide to unlock the iphone, but he would also have to press the phone button, press the keypad button, dial 911, and then press call! That’s a lot of steps! For those of you with locked phones, there is an “emergency call” button they can press which takes them directly to the keypad.

I actually found a free app called Teach 911 (4+) that teaches your kids how to dial 911 on your iphone, and DialSafe Pro (4+) is another free app that teaches kids how to use your phone, complete with simulation 911 calls. We’d definitely have to make sure that the kids understood what a true emergency was, but I think these are excellent teaching tools!

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Have you taken any steps to prepare your little ones on what to do in case of emergencies?