These water safety activities for kids will help you teach important water safety concepts. We’ve go a variety of different projects you can do with children at home, in the classroom, or while swimming.

Link: ‘Who’s Drowning?’ Group Time Activity: A game you can play in the classroom to teach kids about drowning awareness.

Miniature Beach Activity: A Fun activity that will help you reinforce water safety.

Cliff Diver Water Safety Activity: A fun activity that will teach kids an important concept in water safety.

Beach Play Prop Box (Dramatic Play)
Gather as many of the following items as you can:

• Old clean bathing suits in sizes slightly larger than your kids (so they fit over their clothes).
• Towels
• Beach buckets and shovels
• Water toys
• A life jacket or two
• Swimming goggles
• A foam paddle board
• Spare sunglasses
• A whistle (if you dare)
• Binoculars
• And any other water-related props you can access.

Set the props out in your dramatic play area, and have kids take turns playing the role of lifeguard (binoculars, whistle, sunglasses, rescue doughnut), while the others pretend to be beachgoers and swimmers who keep getting into trouble and require a rescue. Encourage the kids to think up scenarios for how the swimmers got themselves into trouble that incorporate the water safety concepts you’re learning about in class.

Life Jacket Play (Dramatic Play)
Collect as many life jackets as you can and set them out in your dramatic play area. (Ask other teachers or parents to loan you whatever life jackets they have at home for the day.) Also try to get your hands on a small blow-up raft, or absent that, some inner-tubes or a canoe. Again, ask other teachers or parents if you don’t have one at home.

Show the kids how to properly put on a life jacket, including the all-important strap that goes between their legs so it doesn’t slide off in the water. Now let them engage in imaginative play, conjuring up play scenarios revolving around times when they would need their lifejackets. Canoe tipped over? Fell out of the raft in a raging river? You were paddle-boarding and went out too far when your paddle board broke? An accident threw you off the boat? The boat sprung a leak and sank? On a jet ski when someone bumped into you and knocked you unconscious? The goal is merely to encourage kids to see a life jacket as a cool to_l that will save their life.