Crucial Crew: lesson plan for teachers

Crucial Crew is an interactive safety and behaviour project aimed at Year 6 pupils, led by North Yorkshire Police and supported by a number of agencies such as North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, Yorkshire Ambulance Service and Network Rail.

The workshop sessions are run at five venues around the county.

Approximately 10,000 children from all across the region attend the Crucial Crew sessions every year.

Aims of Crucial Crew

Its aims are to encourage good citizenship and reduce accidents, injury, crime and protect young people through education and awareness. The event is designed to educate Year 6 pupils in North Yorkshire to make informed decisions when faced with danger and respond effectively to emergency situations and accidents.

The awareness covers consequences of crime and crime prevention relevant to communities which we live in.

The project also shows synchronicity between the event and the education PSHCE citizenship curriculum.

North Yorkshire Police have developed an online, interactive, urban adventure game as a resource to consolidate and reinforce the learning children gain from attending the workshop session and to further enhance knowledge and awareness in these key safety issues.

The game is available now online and can be accessed by any type of device – desktop, laptop, tablet or phone.

It's designed to allow the player to select a character and then work through a series of situations, from perilous water and rail scenarios to cyber bullying and citizenship – all of which are covered in the Crucial Crew session themselves.

The game looks at behaviour in the home, outside house, a fire incident, on the street, at the river, near to rail lines, online and behaviour in general.

The game has been specifically designed in line with the North Yorkshire Personal, Social, Health and Citizenship education planning and assessment tool (PSHCE) key stages.

Aims

To:

1. identify and recognise risks in different situations, to manage then responsibly
2. distinguish and contrast various options , justify the value of a particular strategy

Objectives

To:

• define and identify what type of behaviour is good and or bad/risky (keeping myself safe)
• recognise and demonstrate through scenario game how behaviour can have consequences (both keeping myself safe and relationships.)
• differentiate in my relationships and to resist pressure to do something dangerous , knowing how to ask for help (me and my relationships)
• understand and construct strategies to get help in terms of using technology-internet and recognising respect online and be able to evaluate people not always being who they say they are in this internet world (keeping myself safe)
• understand how being a good citizen is being fully integrated in a community (becoming an active citizen)
• make managed decisions which demonstrate a sense of social justice and moral responsibility thereby identifying and formulating a good safe strategy (becoming an active citizen)

Key skills covered

• English – reading, writing, discussion/listening.
• ICT - internet research, using internet, using computer.
• Maths – scale and proportion partly.

The game has been designed to enable children to use a series of cognitive skills, assessing knowledge, comprehension and application and affective skills of receiving phenomena and responding to same and also valuing various strategies, partly – psychomotor skills in imitation through observing and replicating good behaviour.