In our city there is a problematic situation - kids often cross roads at red lights or do it in wrong places. Based on this, we had identified the main problem: how can we raise awareness of children in the field of traffic rules?
So, because of that, we determined our target - increase awareness between pupils of our school. We chose fifth grades from our school and decided to conduct a series of lessons for them on traffic matters.
The ideas
Children often take example from adults, who, in turn, can not always behave properly. Therefore, if we inform school children about main traffic rules and tell them about possible aftermath of wrong behavior on the road, they will know clearly about how to act on the road and stay safe and sound.
We are determined that the object of the research are the road rules, and the subject – raising awareness of children with traffic rules.
In fact, there was a tragic incident in the history of our school - one of the students was hit by a car. It was in 2014. That boy was only in the 6th grade. It was terrible because he could not walk properly for months.
This issue really attracted us, so we found the statistics of road accidents in Russia with children under 16 years for 2018 in the Internet to make sure of topic’s relevance. There were 19930 incidents, which is 1.8% higher than in 2017.
We decided to conduct tests to monitor students' level of knowledge of in the field of traffic rules. As we reached an audience of 36 students, we needed to easily find out the level of knowledge before our cognitive activities. So we used the Google Form service and created a test that consists of 10 questions about road rules. The advantage of this service is automatic scoring and statistics. In result, we get 21 answers with the average score of 5.95 out of 12, without any completely right work. It means that kids quite badly know traffic rules.
Taking these facts into account, we confirmed that the problem is real. So, we had to solve it!
The initiatives
As for the chosen method of work, we realized that we had to make the process of obtaining information as user-friendly as possible for different personality types. This way, we chose a game lesson with lots of different activities. We chose games of all sorts in order to:
- certainly awake interest of students in this topic;
- to provide materials in the most understandable and convenient form for each type of person (auditory, visual, kinesthetic and mixed).
So we intended to make a discussion on different issues on the subject of traffic rules; quizzes, analysis and discussion on images with behavior errors of pedestrians and drivers on the roads; tests on knowledge of traffic rules and so on. From this, we formulated a hypothesis: if we conduct a lesson with a large number of gaming activities, the material will be absorbed by children much better.
Drawing attention to the method of conducting lessons by teachers in our school, we came to the conclusion that children are more interested in the process if they work in groups. In addition, at the end of our work, we decided to encourage the excellent work of the team with sweet prizes. So we have identified the most effective way to conduct our classes with the fifth grade.
On top of that, we were going to put up informative visual materials over the school to make sure that the children understood the lesson. Also, these materials are seen not only by fifth-graders, but the whole school. Thus, we were able to reach all t our school's students with the subject of the rules on the road. If the provided information is constantly in the kids' mind, it will definitely be stored in the long-term memory.
The creativity of our method lies in making interesting games that immediately turn students into the process of learning new information about traffic rules. Realizing all our responsibilityt, we understood that we need to do all the work by ourselves. That is why our project is completely original.
Honestly, after the event we formed a positive impression about our students from the fifth form. In addition, the children's feedback about our lesson was almost only positive, and they were delighted with our interaction. We had a full understanding with most of the students and almost every child was interested in the process. Also we received special respect from their teachers.
After the event we needed to know if our test group enriches their knowledge of traffic rules. Re-testing in Google Forms showed an increase in the average score to 7.16 out of 10. In addition, there were 3 works that got the maximum scores.
Also we notice that now children in our school less often play mobile games between lessons and pay attention to our posters. Also few pupils make comments about others’ wrong behavior on the road.
Thus, our hypothesis about the effectiveness of the game lesson with different types of activities received practical confirmation.
So, conducting an analysis of our work done, we concluded that we have achieved our goal. But this does not mean that our work will end there. In the future, we plan to conduct monitoring of children's knowledge in the field of Traffic rules. We want to contribute to the organization of various events with competitions for knowing the rules.
This small victory is only the beginning of a long journey.
