Playground Safety at School

It’s summer and playground safety at your preschool is most important. Setting playground rules and monitoring children as they play isn’t enough to ensure your students’ safety on the playground. You and your class should check to make sure your school’s playground equipment, and the area surrounding it, are also “child safe.”

Purpose: To help you and your students monitor playground safety.

Materials for Playground Safety Checklist (HTML | PDF): Rulers, meter sticks, or other measuring tools; yarn, scissors, construction paper; tape, markers, and crayons.

Preparation: Make one chart-sized copy of the “Playground Safety Checklist” to use with the whole class and copies of the checklist to distribute to small groups of students.

Procedure: Talk to students about the things that make them safe on the playground. The discussion may include safety rules for playing with others and using the playground equipment; an adult is always watching and ready to help, etc.

Place the “Playground Safety Checklist” on a bulletin board and discuss each point. Use rulers and meter sticks to illustrate each of the important dimensions in the checklist. As a class, create “measuring sticks” of yarn or construction paper strips for each of these dimensions: 12 inches, 6 feet, 9 feet, 30 inches, 3.5 inches, 9 inches.

Assign groups of students different points from the checklist to look for on the playground. Distribute the corresponding measuring tools to each group.

Help students use the tools to check their playground equipment. Come back together as a whole class and talk about what they found. Does anything need to be fixed, such as removing tripping hazards, filing down sharp points, or adding more safe surface? Is each piece of equipment safely situated on the playground?

Now, distribute construction paper and markers and have students draw their dream playground. What playground equipment or play spaces would it include? How can they make sure that their dream playgrounds are safe?

Going Further: Place the completed pictures around the safety checklist on the bulletin board. Invite administrators to class to hear about what you and your students have discovered about playground safety. Use this as the “kick-off” for Playground Safety Saturday, a day when parents work together to make the playground better and safer for everyone.

Accidents can happen no matter how watchful you might be, but prevention and preparedness do pay off in safer playgrounds and fewer problems.

Teaching Tip: Read "Play Day in the Park (PDF)," a Building Blocks Easy Reader, starring all the Friends. As you read the book with the class, talk about ways the Friends have fun and play safely.

Related Family Article: Monitoring Playground Safety

Resources

• Public Playground Safety Checklist (PDF) from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission provides a 10-point checklist for playground safety.
• Playground Safety from KidsHealth provides tips for monitoring your child on the playground and ensuring that playgrounds are safe—from surfaces to equipment.
• How Safe Is Your Playground? from Parenthood provides very simple playground safety tips.