Enhance Poison Prevention Education to Keep Children Safe from Toxicants

National Poison Prevention Week is coming. The goal of this special week is to raise awareness of the risk of being poisoned by household products, medicines, pesticides, plants, bites and stings, food poisoning, and fumes. Children are always curious about everything, and have poorer ability of self-control; thus children belong to the group needing more help in poison prevention work. Schools have great responsibility to educate children how to prevent horrible poison.

Knowledge of poison prevention is complex and fussy, while teachers first need to make children clear about the most important or efficient contents.

1. Raise students’ awareness of the danger in poisons. Students may be naughty and rebelled, so the best way to persuade them to be cautious about the toxic is to make them well know the danger and harm. According to the research, Over 1000 Americans die from poisoning every year. And more than two million potential poison exposures are reported every year to American Poison Control Centers. On average, poison centers handle 1 possible poisoning every 13 seconds.

2. Tell students how to avoid the harm from poison. When children know the danger of the toxic, it is time to help them act correctly and properly in their daily life. People live with poisons every day. Some small actions may result in unhappy endings. Tell students what they can do and what they cannot.

3. Share some symptoms of being poisoned and the fist aid tips. Unavoidably, some students or people beside them may be tortured by the toxicants. When emergency happens, the knowledge students learned can be of great help for themselves and also the other victims.

With the above training, the possibility for children to be poisoned can be reduced in some degree, and also even when some accidents happen, they themselves will take proper actions to relieve the pain. The following are some links for schools to share with students for poison prevention:

http://poisonhelp.hrsa.gov/

http://www.poisonprevention.org/

http://www.poison.org/

These are all professional and authoritative websites of poison prevention. Situations, treatment, first aid tips, etc. can be easily found there.

It is important to adopt poison prevention education, and the way to pass relating knowledge to students is also critical to the teaching efficiency.

1. Make children disseminators of poison prevention in voluntary activities.

During the poison prevention week, schools can organize some voluntary activities in communities, such as propagating poison prevention to residents, which will drive students’ sense of responsibility. Thus, they must devote to learn the knowledge and maybe they will continue passing the knowledge to others after the week. Teachers can also help students create some poison PowerPoint slideshows as courseware telling how to prevent being poisoned and tips for first aid. With the knowledge and courseware, students must do the voluntary job more efficiently.

2. Generate online poison prevention quiz for students to take.

Tests act as another method to encourage students to study poison prevention. Teachers can make quizzes about poison prevention and upload them to websites or LMSs for students to take. One thing to remember is to keep the quiz interesting and attractive, and this will draw students’ interests. A quiz can be made with Google Docs, free online websites and quiz maker, etc. The online test made with quiz software like Wondershare QuizCreator is recommended to school use. It can create quizzes with multimedia (images, audios, Flash videos, Flash movies, etc.), more question types and more publish channels, which definitely will please the quiz takers.

Educating students on poison prevention is a task for a long time. Teachers and school authorities must take the responsibility to help children know more about the toxicants, so there will be fewer tragedies.