P3B372: Pop-up Safety Town in a Box: Ready-made Injury Prevention Lesson Plans for Head Start Teachers

Background: Unintentional injuries are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in children and adolescents, particularly those living in resource-poor, underserved, or remote communities where access to injury prevention education may be limited. To address this disparity, we developed the "Pop-Up Safety Curriculum in a Box" resource to provide Head Start (HS) locations with ready-made injury prevention lesson plans, online teacher training, classroom props, and parent handouts. Our objective was to have HS teachers pilot the curriculum in their classrooms and obtain their feedback via surveys.

Methods: The "Pop-Up Safety Curriculum in a Box" included four lesson plans (Medication, Dog Bite, Helmet, and Pedestrian Safety) adapted from a successful, in-person "Pop-Up Safety Town" program that provides one-time injury prevention education events at HS centers. Each curriculum box (Figure 1) included printed lesson plans, demonstration materials, parent educational handouts, links to age-appropriate audiovisual learning videos, discussion prompts, and instructions for interactive demonstrations. An accompanying training website was created to train teachers (www.childcarenetwork.org/popupsafety). The curriculum was piloted from January to March 2023 by HS teachers, and online post-lesson teacher evaluation surveys were administered for each topic. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics.

Results: Three HS programs piloted the curriculum in a box program in their classrooms. Teacher responses are summarized in Table 1. All lesson plans were rated as "helpful": teacher lesson plans (4.1), student activities (4.2), and orientation website (4.2). On a scale of 1 (difficult to teach) to 5 (very easy to teach), lessons averaged a score of easy to teach (4.4). Teachers were most likely to recommend the dog bite prevention lesson to other teachers (4.7), but helmet safety was the least likely to be recommended (3.3). Teachers noted that the helmet safety lesson was slightly too long in duration although not difficult to teach. Props from pedestrian safety were the most highly rated (4.9), with teachers noting the activity was an exceptionally effective learning experience for their students.

Conclusion: The "Pop-Up Safety Curriculum in a Box" is a novel and effective way to partner with HS teachers to bring injury prevention education to young children in underserved and remote communities. The lesson plans, in combination with the orientation website and activities, provide a concise and comprehensive option for providing teachers a way to teach injury prevention principles to HS children in resource-poor areas that currently cannot be reached in-person. Our next steps include modifying the helmet lesson and then piloting our program in rural, migrant, and Native American HS locations.