Spooky safety scenarios

What you'll need

• Spooky scenarios handout—six pages per student or group
• Safety messages handout—one per student or group
• Drawing and colouring supplies
• Scissors

In the activity, you’ll review a series of safety messages, and then match them to the corresponding characters and their scenarios. The goal is to get students thinking about safety hazards and practices they might take for granted in their community.

Review the safety messages

1. Give students a few minutes to read the safety messages sheet, or for younger students read them out loud for the class.
    
2. Review the messages with the class one at a time and explain what it means in more detail. If students aren’t familiar, considering describing a scenario where the safety issue would come up. To get students engaged, ask them if they already know any of the safety tips and give them a chance to share their experiences.
    
3. Share that students are going to meet six characters, some of them from another realm where they don’t understand how electricity works! They’re going to match the safety messages to these characters, so they’ll need to cut them out individually and get ready to match them up.

Spooky scenarios

1. Hand out the Spooky scenarios printouts and explain that each page has a unique character. You can also hand out each page one at a time so that students focus on one character at a time. You can put students in groups and give them a few characters each, or give each student one or all six characters.
    
2. Choose one character at a time and read the brief character description with the class. Students are prompted to draw the scene around each character. Give students time to doodle some things they come up with. Encourage students to think of things they may take for granted relevant to each character:
   • Gwendolyn Witchy: Powerful modern features of a neighbourhood, for example power poles, cars, and streetlights.
   • Jack-o-Lantern:  Nighttime dangers like dark paths and tripping hazards.
   • Boggy: Features of forests and recreation areas like trees, ponds, rivers, lakes, paths, signposts, and fences.
   • Wilfred: Places you shouldn’t run around like transformer boxes, power poles, fenced areas, and construction zones.
   • Zed: Electrified items in the home like appliances, cords, and outlets.
   • Volt: Major sources of electricity like power poles, transformer boxes, batteries, and outlets.
      
3. Take time as a class to share ideas and see what everyone has come up with. Prompt as needed.
    
4. In the bottom half of the page, students are prompted to paste some of the safety messages they cut out into the box. There can be multiple correct answers and interpretations, but the important thing is for students to connect safety hazards and behaviours with the scenario.
    
   Encourage them to write in their own ideas if time permits and review non-energy safety tips too, like watching for cars on the road or not entering a stranger’s home without a guardian present.
    
5. Repeat steps 2-4 for each character. See Teaching notes for more information on how the safety messages connect to each character. Some messages can connect to multiple characters, in which case students can write them in again.
    
6. Give the class a chance to decide if all the characters are going to be safe on Halloween night or if there are any more messages to share with them first. Ask the class to raise their hand and share if there’s a safety message they’ve been inspired to adopt on Halloween or beyond.

Hang them on the wall (Optional)

You might choose to display the characters on the wall or hallway as a reminder of the safety tips you discussed.