First Aid Unit Study

When I saw that Miranda needed to earn a First Aid badge for our church Master Clubs program (similar to Awana) I had a light bulb moment!
I realized First Aid would make a great unit study for all of the kids to do together.

With any unit study I first look through our books to see what I already have on hand. We have several health books as well as many science books so I pulled those off the shelves and went through those taking notes. Second, I make a folder in my favorites and search the internet, saving any appropriate sites I want to look through. Third, I visit the library and add to what I already have. I make notes all the while and plan my "spine" for the study.

I began our unit with The Good Samaritan from Luke 10. To me this exemplified a person with great compassion who administered first aid in such a kind and loving way.

For memorization I made charts of the following:
The four C's of first aid:
*confidence
*common sense
*calmness
*comfort
We learned "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver" Proverbs 25:11 because this drives home the point that showing common sense and words of comfort to a person in distress is very important.

We also memorized the ABC's of good first aid:
*Airway open
*Breathing independently
*Circulation controlled

The definition of first aid:
"the emergency care given to a person who is injured or suddenly becomes ill"

With first aid the topics could be endless so I narrowed down what I wanted to cover:
Bleeding; fractures-simple and compound; strains and sprains; fainting; and burns-first, second, and third degree.
We covered how to help someone in those situations and appropriate procedures.

The children had a great time improvising and making splints out of items they could find around the house.

Our vocabulary words:
fracture
simple fracture
compound fracture
splint
sprain
strain
RICE- rest, ice, compression, elevation
pressure
elevate
faint
clammy
wound
laceration
stitches

I knew that I wanted to add a game to our unit so I made a simple one using a small poster board (11x14). I added questions and "draw a question card" to the blanks that I made using a ruler. After that I simply put questions on the fronts of small index cards that I had stashed with the answers on the back and I placed them in a small envelope that I glued to my game board. We used a dice and water bottle tops as tokens (of course many things would work for this.)





We also put together a first aid binder to have on hand for review any time we need it.

Here are a few links we used to help in our study:
Scouting Web First Aid
First Aid Coloring Book-For younger students
Mini First Aid Kits-we did not make these but it looks good
Teaching First Aid to Kids
First Aid Games


After all was said and done the kids learned a lot. Hopefully they'll remember it-if and when the time comes they ever need to use it!