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Action stations!
In BestStart Taradale's young children’s centre our group planning for July was focused around ‘Emergency Services’. The children expressed a great interest in imaginary play based around doctors/nurses, ambulances, fire fighters, police and defence forces. We were extremely fortunate to have special visitors from each field come and visit us to educate the children on all the work they do for everyone in our community and even country!
Our first visitor was an NZ Army soldier Alana. Alana educated the children on how to put up her special tent they use to sleep in, she brought her gear for them to try on and even ran them through a special obstacle course! One child took a great interest to this and even brought in her very own army uniform and a special picture of her cousin who is also in the NZ Army!
Next was a visit from our local police officers! Mark who is a parent here at BestStart Taradale is a police officer, so he brought along two other officers and even a police dog! The children got to see what a police car looked like from the inside and even got to hear all the different sirens and noises these cars could make! One of the most exciting parts was getting to meet the police dog who the children got to pat.
Tania one of our kaiako organised her husband Simon who is a firefighter to come in along with two other firefighters and of course the big fire truck! The children have been particularly interested in firefighters and have been loving reading and singing our fire truck songs! The children learnt about the firefighting gear and all the equipment inside a fire truck while getting a special tour through it!
And finally, we had an ambulance driver Nat who visited with her ambulance! The children have been setting up lots of hospitals taking great care of ‘sick’ patients. So, it was awesome to have Nat come and educate the children on how they take great care of sick patients in real life. And of course, we were able to have a special tour inside the ambulance as we were shown what equipment was inside and the children even got to try on special helmets they wear!
Through this focus and the experiences provided, the children’s knowledge and learning of emergency services was extended, they were able to build on creative thinking and imagination, it promoted group play, we did real fire and earthquake drills which were a great success, there was plenty of parent involvement and many resources were kindly donated from our BestStart whanau.