Early years activity: Make your own safety clothing
This activity helps children explore how bright and reflective materials improve visibility in the dark. Through hands-on fun making ‘reflective ribbons,’ they’ll learn real-life safety while sparking creativity and curiosity.
Make your own safety clothing activity learning aims
- Recognising how people stay safe in different situations
- Exploring materials to design and bring ideas to life
- Understanding safety and self-care.
Resources you will need for this activity
- Pictures of workers in high visibility clothing such as emergency services, construction workers etc.
- Old, light coloured t-shirts
- Brightly coloured fabric pens, paints, or felt tips
- Reflective materials
- Glue and scissors
- Variety of reflective/glow in the dark items
- Area which can be made dark
- Key chains/safety pins.
Make your own safety clothing activity outline
- Share the pictures of workers wearing high-visibility clothing and talk about why these are important to keep them safe
- Show the children some reflective high-visibility items. Turn off the lights, close the blinds and encourage them to explore a selection of items, noticing which ones can be seen in the dark and which cannot. Encourage the children to observe that brightly coloured and reflective items stand out, while darker items are harder to see. Use a torch to demonstrate how reflective materials reflect back the light
- Encourage children to look at their own bags, wellies, coats etc. while using torches to see if they have reflective materials on them
- Switch the lights back on and introduce a range of brightly coloured fabrics, fluorescent paints and reflective stickers. Cut the old t-shirts up into strips and encourage the children to use their creativity to decorate these ribbons of fabric so they could be seen at night-time focusing on bright and reflective designs
- Once the designs are dry attach them to a keychain and clip them onto the children’s coats or bags
- Turn the lights off and explore their creations together by shining a torch on the designs to show how the bright and reflective parts stand out in the dark
- Encourage reflective questions to help the children understand what they have identified about high-visibility materials.
How to extend this activity
Set up a dark den with a box of various objects, including reflective, glow-in-the-dark, fluorescent and brightly coloured items, as well as objects that do not glow. Provide torches so children can explore, investigate and experiment with the different materials in their play.
Disclaimer: Activities with children must always be risk assessed, including for allergies or choking. Children must always have adequate supervision. Resources and materials must always be appropriate for children’s age and stage of development.
- Activity
- MyNDNA
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