Teaching kids of all ages about road safety is one of the most important things you can do as a parent. Car accidents are incredibly common every year, with about six million taking place in the U.S. alone. Thankfully, there are numerous crafts that you can do with your kids to help illustrate the importance of road safety in a way that is both fun and hands-on!
Some companies do sell toys and products that can help with this, but they never work as well as a good at-home DIY! 40% of buyers end up regretting their purchases after they were positive they’d love what they bought, and these kinds of cheap toys are part of that. With that being said, here are four of our favorite road safety DIY crafts that you and your kids can do together.
1. Cardboard and Construction Paper Traffic Signs
One way to help teach your kids about road safety is to make DIY road signs to help them get familiar with all the different kinds of signs that line roadways. You and your kids can easily create these signs from cardboard, construction paper, and markers. While creating them, you can tell them what each sign means and how to be safe if they see one. For instance, if you’re making a crosswalk sign, you can tell them that this sign means that it’s safe to cross the road, but only after looking both ways and waiting for the road to be clear. You can even use these signs in creative games where you hold up a sign and then your kids have to either tell you or demonstrate what you’re supposed to do when you see it.
2. Red Light, Green Light
Another great craft to consider is making your own stoplight to help small kids understand what to do at traffic lights. To make your own stoplight, you can use cardboard, colored paper, and remote-controlled LED lights in red, yellow, and green. You can then use this in a fun game of red light green light, where kids have to stop, go, or slow down depending on what light you turn on. For instance, if you switch the green light on, they can run towards you, but they need to slow or stop when you switch to yellow or red. This is a great way to help them learn about traffic signals, while also giving them a fun game to play!
3. Make Your Own Car
If you have a traffic play road rug, you can buy small wooden cars that your kids can then paint and decorate to make their own. Once they have their car the way they like it, they can head over to the road rug and start practicing their driving skills. Road rugs often feature things like roundabouts and intersections which you can use to help teach your kids about yielding and right-of-way. For instance, if one of your kids pulls their car into an intersection before the other, you can explain to them why the person who stops first gets to go first. This is a great and fun way to teach your kids about road safety in a fun and engaging way that they can understand.
4. Use Your Home
Lastly, you can use the signs that you’ve created — such as yield signs and stop signs — and post them up around your home. For example, at the end of a hallway, you can add a stop sign to teach kids to stop there and look both ways. If two people try to enter the hallway at the same time, the rule about who stops first can also apply. This ongoing game is another great way to use some of the crafts that you’ve made in a way that further helps cement the rules of the road in your children’s minds.
When it comes to teaching kids of all ages about road safety, there are a lot of great options. However, by using crafts and getting your kids involved in their education in a hands-on, interactive, and fun way, you can make learning about safety engaging and interesting. This way, kids will be more receptive and the lessons will stick.
It goes without saying that road safety is incredibly important at any age. With car accidents in the U.S. totaling over six million a year, you want to make sure that you are teaching your children how to be safe on and around the road. We hope that these DIYs can help you teach your children the ways of the road!
