Protecting kids Camp:gaining self-rescue skill

Summer holiday is not only a happy time for children in their childhood, but also a high risk period for drowning, traffic accidents and other accidents. 2024 summer heavy rainfall in many places and triggered floods, landslides and other natural disasters, which added a point of risk for children's holiday. During the summer holidays and before the holidays, One Foundation Protecting kids Camp, in conjunction with social organisation partners in many places, went into campuses and communities in order to provide interesting and effective safety education and enhance children's ability to cope with risks.

Participatory teaching to make drowning prevention education truly effective

Enhancing children's awareness of injury prevention and control and improving their safe growing environment can reduce the chances of children avoiding encountering injuries. According to the 2022 <China's Children Development Programme (2021-2030) >Statistical Monitoring Report released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the child injury mortality rate will be 8.74/100,000 in 2022, a decrease of 15.0 per cent from the 2021 rate. The child drowning mortality rate fell from 3.29/100,000 in 2021 to 3.04/100,000, a 7.6 per cent drop.

Jing Wang is a rescue team member, pre-hospital first aid trainer, and instructor at Protecting kids Camp. Over the past ten years, Wang Jing has been involved in many drowning rescue operations, and the heartbreaking cries of the parents of the deceased children make people feel the same way.

How can we keep children away from danger? ‘Do not go to the river to play in the water’ such a simple advice does not solve the problem. Wang Jing said: ‘In our long-term practice of child safety education, we found that the more we do not allow children to do things, but the more children want to explore. In the face of disasters, in fact, there is no 100 per cent correct, the response should be based on the actual scene, can not be dogmatic. Protecting kids Camp project to collate a number of disaster survivor cases, so that people can be immersed in the safety story, more in line with the curiosity of children and the desire to explore the characteristics of the experiential and participatory classroom so that the safety of education is lively and fun. ’

Summer is a period of high incidence of safety accidents, children drowning incidents, and drowning of groups of children caused by going into the water to save others also occur from time to time. Every summer before the holiday, Wang Jing went to schools in her hometown to carry out anti-drowning courses, using scenarios that can be interacted with children to teach: if a companion falls into the water, we have a better choice, call 120, shout for help to seek help from an adult, or to provide the person who has fallen into the water with a school bag, empty water bottle, rope, sticks, etc..

There are more than a thousand Protecting kids Camp safety education instructors like Jing Wang in China by the end of 2023. Another lecturer, Wang Hua, said, ‘Flood prevention and control inevitably involves self-rescue, and some people still can't swim, so it's very necessary to teach people who can't swim the large-character tilt-and-float method.’

Innovative course forms make safety education more interesting

Around the summer of 2024, Protecting kids Camp will carry out a number of activities to provide better safety education for kids by innovating the content of safety education courses and enhancing the capacity of safety education instructors.

Instead of sheltering children from the wind and rain, it is better to teach them how to use an umbrella. One Foundation hopes that safety education will no longer over-protect children in the name of safety, but let the awareness of safety and the ability of self-rescue and mutual rescue go into every child's heart.