Live Safe! Work Smart!

Resources for Teachers of Students with Special Learning Needs

Seven basic health and safety lessons

If you need to teach students about health and safety, and have students with special needs or students who respond best to visual lessons and simple concepts, you can use our new Live Safe! Work Smart! Resources for Teachers of Students with Special Learning Needs.

This coil-bound resource book provides seven simple and straightforward health and safety lessons designed, in consultation with life skills teachers, for use in teaching students who may be deaf, blind, have a learning disability, or simply need a different approach to learning.

The books have been printed and distributed to contacts at all school boards in Ontario. If you need additional copies, please visit the Publications Ontario website to place an order.

Stop and ask./Go. Be safe.

This simple theme runs through the new resource. Young workers need to be able to recognize signs of danger in a workplace and be aware of the vital importance of asking questions if something doesn't seem right.

The lessons were created with the idea that students will need to decide if something is either safe or dangerous. For example, in the lesson dealing with chemicals there are examples of safe and dangerous liquids along with an exercise asking students to pick out the safe or dangerous liquids in a series of pictures.

Lesson summaries at the end of each lesson provide a number of scenarios and ask students to decide if they should stop and ask their supervisor what to do or if they can continue working and be safe.

Stop and ask, go be safe signThe resource includes “signs” (on pages 17 and 18) that students can hold up in response to these questions. Some have printed the signs and had them laminated for durability. One teacher even created paddles for her students to hold up with one sign on each side. You might think of other ways to use these. (Note: The below resources open in a new tab/window)

Download the “Stop and ask” sign [PDF 64 kb] and the “Go. Be safe” sign [PDF 83 kb].

"Spot the hazard” exercise

On pages 13 and 15 of the resource you'll find pictures of a restaurant environment and a gas bar. Each picture has several hazards that students can be asked to identify as an introductory exercise or perhaps as an activity to reinforce learning. There are versions in the book with possible answers for your reference. Here are the the pictures for download: restaurant [PDF 951 kb]  gas bar [PDF 938 kb].

Files for the handouts and activities

If you've seen the new resource you'll know that each lesson provides. teacher's notes along with thumbnails of overheads, which appear in full page format at the end of the lesson. In addition, there are activities interspersed throughout the lessons. Any handouts for these appear in the flow of the lessons.

For your convenience we are providing PDF files for all of the handouts and overheads in the resource. Once you've downloaded the files they can be viewed and printed using the Adobe© Reader©.

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If you want to take the material and re-work it for your own needs, it's possible to copy from the files and paste words and images into a Microsoft Word document or a PowerPoint presentation. The files have been set up so that they cannot be edited.

Note: The resources contained in the below Lesson pages open in a new tab/window.

In the Special Learning Needs Section



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