Rail safety refresher for students

While the summer days soon draw to an end for students, it’s a good time to sit down and review their rail safety knowledge.

Whether your kids are just starting school or about to graduate, rail safety awareness and education is neverending.

• Start educating your children early, over breakfast perhaps, with some easily digestible rail safety tips with the Operation Lifesaver activity placemat.

• Make rail safety an activity that your kids do in their free time with a kid-friendly rail safety activity booklet.

• When out running errands with the kids, incorporate rail safety as regular everyday occurrence by familiarizing your kids with railway signage. Not only will the kids benefit, but so will parents by fine-tuning their own rail safety knowledge.

• Emphasize with your kids that the railway safety message of “Look, Listen and Live” is just as important as “Don’t talk to Strangers”.

• Bookmark olkids.ca for a wide variety of games, stories and videos, perfect for kids.

Attempting to shake the summer haze away for teenagers can be a bit tricky

• After a summer of Xbox, hanging with friends and overall summer good times, a great tool to get your teen’s brain back into ‘scholastic mode’ is by springing a rail safety refresher pop quiz.

• Keep the rail safety momentum going by playing some rail safety hard-hitting videos, like the one below, which will definitely resonate longer than the time it takes for teens to scroll through their Facebook newsfeed.

• Or, if finding time during the day is proving difficult, take time in the evening at the dinner table, and review some back-to-school rail safety basics. A good tool to use to start the conversation is the Operation Lifesaver Student Safety Guide.

• Finally, if  you only have a few minutes of your teen’s attention before they send their next text, deliver some staggering railway fatality and injury statistics to ring the message home that rail safety is important. 

When you’re sending them off to class on their first day of the school year, remember that rail safety should be reviewed year after year, no matter how old they are.  

Stay rail safe this school year.