Teaching Children the First Notions of Survival
Planning a Survival Preparedness
The first step in teaching your children survival skills is to plan training sessions that are fun and interactive. Use this opportunity to spend quality time as a family while instilling skills that could one day save your child’s life.
Among the key elements to consider in this planning are:
• Activities must be appropriate for the child’s age
• Sessions should not be too long, to maintain the child’s interest.
• Provide rewards to encourage your children to participate.
Familiarization with the Environment
Knowledge of the environment is an essential aspect of survival skills. Teach your child to identify landmarks, observe the movement of the sun and moon, meet natural beings and understand their biology.
Outdoor Safety Education
Outdoor outings provide a perfect opportunity to teach your children survival skills. Plan hikes, camping trips, or picnics where you can demonstrate how to build a makeshift shelter, find drinking water, or even start a campfire.
Knowledge of First Aid
Knowing first aid is an essential survival skill. Get a first aid kit and show your child how to use the different items. Make him understand the importance of protection, of the’alarm, of rest, of the’assistance and theevacuation in case of emergency.
Emergency Communication
One of the first skills your children should learn is knowing who to contact in an emergency. Make sure they know how to contact your country’s emergency services and understand the importance of remaining calm in a crisis situation.
Regular Practice Makes Perfection
Finally, the key to learning survival skills is to practice regularly. Do regular exercises to help your child strengthen these skills. Consider using role-playing games to make the practice more friendly and interesting.
Acting now by educating your child on survival skills can make all the difference in an emergency situation. It’s up to us, as parents, to give our children the tools they need to protect themselves in all circumstances.
Outdoor Survival Techniques for Kids
Basics of Outdoor Survival
Before embarking on learning different techniques, it is crucial to understand the three essential rules of survival: stay warm, stay hydrated and report your location.
1. Stay Warm: Children must learn to build a simple shelter with available materials such as branches, leaves, moss or snow. They can also use emergency equipment like survival blankets Himalayan Explorers to protect against cold and humidity.
2. Stay Hydrated: Teach your children to find and purify water in nature. They can use portable water filters like the Lifestraw or learn natural purification techniques.
3. Report your location: Showing your children how to use an emergency whistle or how to create visible signals with natural materials can save their lives if they become lost.
Forge links
Knots are essential survival tools. They are useful for building shelters, hoisting supplies, catching food, or making tools. Basic knots to teach children include the overhand knot, the figure eight knot, and the fisherman’s knot.
Navigate Nature
It is important to teach children how to navigate without the help of technology. Knowing how to decipher a map or use a compass can be invaluable. Likewise, knowing directions from the position of the sun, stars or even moss on trees can be a big help.
Know How to Identify Plants
Skill in recognizing edible and poisonous plants can mean the difference between survival and danger. It is essential to teach children to identify, at least, the most common berries, mushrooms and plants in your area.
First Aid in Nature
It is crucial for children to know the basic principles of first aid, including how to treat cuts, abrasions, insect bites and what to do in case of broken bones.
By taking the time to teach our children these basic survival skills, we not only empower them to safely have fun outdoors, but also develop their self-confidence and respect for nature.
Useful Urban Survival Techniques for Children
The keys to preparation
The preparation is essential for urban survival. Children need to be educated on different ways to stay safe in their city. This can take several forms, including:
- Teach children the main emergency numbers
- Teach them how to get safely to a designated location in the event of an emergency
- Conduct regular emergency preparedness exercises.
Personal safety in urban environments
Personal safety is a major concern in urban environments. Children need to be aware that danger can arise in different ways and it is essential to take steps to protect themselves. This may include:
- Knowledge of basic rules of road safety like looking both ways before crossing a street
- There knowledge of the environment – It is essential that they recognize common places such as their house, their school, the nearest police or fire offices
- Training in the concept of stranger-danger – it is important to teach children not to blindly trust people they do not know.
Basic survival skills
Even in an urban environment, some classic survival skills can be very useful. In particular, it is important that children learn to:
- Find shelter – Not only in terms of finding a safe place in case of danger, but also how to stay dry if caught off guard
- Finding drinking water – Even in cities, this could become necessary in the event of a prolonged outage of the water supply network
Knowledge of first aid
Another crucial element of any survival training is knowledge of first aid. This includes understanding how to treat minor cuts and scrapes, how to make a makeshift bandage, and when and how to perform CPR.
As a final word, it is important to note that these tips and techniques are not intended to scare your children, but rather to give them the tools they need to feel safe and confident, no matter the situation.
Practical Games and Exercises to Teach Survival to Children
1. The Great Game of Survival
This game can be played indoors or outdoors, with simple rules that can be modified depending on the age of the child. The goal is to survive with limited resources while overcoming different challenges. For example, you can ask children to build a shelter with objects found around the house. You can then discuss the suitability of their shelter in case of natural disasters.
2. Orienteering hike
This is a great opportunity to teach children how to use a map and compass, or how to identify natural landmarks. You can turn this into a scavenger hunt by hiding items for the children to find following the directions on the map. Be sure to monitor activity closely to ensure their safety.
3. First aid exercise
Use dolls or stuffed animals to simulate injuries and show your children how to properly administer first aid. You can create scenarios based on real-life situations, such as bleeding, fracture or burn. Introduce commonly available first aid tools and recognized brands like MyKit Or SurvivalKit to make them more familiar with their use.
4. Distress signal game
Teach children the distress signals commonly used during emergency situations. This can be done in the form of charades where children are asked to interpret different distress signals. This could also include learning about emergency light or sound signals and what they mean.
5. The “I Survive” training course
It is an obstacle course where each step requires the development of a particular survival skill. Obstacles may include building a shelter, filtering water, identifying edible plants, etc. To make the journey more engaging, it could be presented as an adventure where success at each obstacle helps them overcome a fictional survival situation.
It is essential to supervise these activities and provide age-appropriate guidance. With these games and exercises, your children will not only learn important survival skills, but they will also have fun. Remember, it’s never too early to learn how to be prepared and stay safe.
