Every year thousands of organisations across the UK take part in Child Safety Week.  Holding hundreds of events or coming up with great ways of getting safety messages across to parents and families in fun, imaginative and engaging ways.

Your event or activity needn’t cost a fortune to stage or run, by working in partnership with other local organisations, or joining forces with your local fire service or local school, you can share both costs and ideas.

Below are some of the activities that are happenning this week - keep checking the page, we’re adding more all the time. And below this year’s activities, we’ve got some ideas from last year’s Child Safety Week.

View Child Safety Week 2011 in a larger map

Here are just a few examples from 2010 to give you a little inspiration.

Registered Childminder

“Child Safety Week is an annual reminder of child safety, which is so important in my line of work, with lots of practical tips and ideas to pass on to parents.

“We practised our fire safety drill, as well as practising crossing the road which the children took great pleasure in doing for real during the school pick up.  We also talked about the importance of wearing seatbelts in the car, no matter how short the journey, with many of the children saying that they always told their parents that they knew they always had to wear their seatbelt!

“We made good use of the quizzes and colouring sheets, they were a very good way of getting the children to think about safety and it was great to see them proudly point out any potential safety hazards to their parents and gave them another chance to tell their mums and dads why they must wear a seatbelt.”

Schools Out Club

Throughout the week the club based their after school activities around Child Safety Week, making use of the downloadable quizzes and Colour Me Safe competition for children to design their own poster on safety.

To mark the launch of Child Safety Week, the focus of the club was on road safety, where children were taught the Green Cross Code, with children taking it in turns to cross a pretend road in the playroom.  We also played the traffic light game and made traffic light biscuits of all shapes and sizes - clearly demonstrating the different traffic lights from around the world!

As a result of our activities, many parents are now taking a concerted effort to teach their children how to cross the road safely, as many children named and shamed their parents for not practising the Green Cross Code.

“Child Safety Week is a great way of communicating with children and their parents about the importance of child safety and accident prevention, and helps refresh memories in a fun way so it does not feel like they are being ‘taught’ how to look after their children.  It gives parents the opportunity to share past stories and experiences that can in turn help other parents and children.”