Assisting your kid with the senior secondary mathematics subject might not be your forte. More to add, enhancing their skills by teaching them a foreign language in their third or fourth year of life is also not easily accomplished. But as a parent, you are always qualified to take your kid outdoors and educate them about effective survival skills. After all, promoting outdoor activities allows them to explore the environment, get fresh air, and serve a predominant role in child development.
1. Educating Them about the Importance of Fire
Besides keeping you warm in the colder regions, fire also wards off predators and provides heat for your culinary practices. While it’s risky for kids to build a fire, comprehensive education on fire can help them stay away from it when not required. Given the importance of fire in many rituals and customs, one should not let kids discourage the concept of fire.
Instead, you can let your children learn how to respect the flames. As you teach the good facets of fire, don’t forget to educate them about the bad aspects. Experimenting with fire is one of them. Help cultivate safe places to light the fire in the local ecosystem. Make them familiar with how they should be extinguished and contained.
For children, it is imperative to learn the risks and causes if they see a spark anywhere around them. While camping, besides carrying a cost-effective outdoor subscription box, you need to teach a lesson to your kid on cooking over the campfire.
2. Using Digital Maps to Learn Navigation
Regardless of the multifaceted complications of maritime technologies, your kid should learn how to read digital maps. While assisting them with paper maps can give a strong foundation, there is no denying the appeal of digital technologies. Reading how to read a map is empowering and beneficial.
Not to forget, it helps adventurers to understand the location and the surrounding areas. This gives them a solid starting point to chart out a course and reach the destination. Always initiate with basics such as orienting charts. Then, understand the topographic demarcations and cardinal directions. Help your child identify and discern rivers, lakes, roads, and mountains.
Having insights into the locations gives your kids a great ground to learn more advanced skills as they learn and grow. To mention a few, concepts that cause declination, calculating distances between the two points, and finding slope angles are other exciting areas your kids can enhance skills once they grow.
3. Respecting the Power of Survival Kits
Given the utility of survival kits, they are powerful, strong, and dangerous. Thus, the first thing to do is enhance your kids’ skills about the importance of these tools. Knives, being one of the fascinating tools kids love, should be treated as a survival kit. Help them gain knowledge about their dangerous and powerful features, which is why they are regarded as survival gear.
As kids are always inquisitive about the things around them, embrace their curiosity and excel in their knife-handling skills. For this reason, you need to start with an age-appropriate pocket knife (a multi-tool can also serve the purpose). What you need to do is encourage accurate hand placement and finger positioning. Explain to them thoroughly the best way to evaluate whether or not a situation is a safe place to use the blade.
4. Teaching How to Raise Situational Awareness
Let’s say your child was out on the football ground, and while coming back, he saw a small puppy crying in the middle of the road. In such scenarios, what will they do? Will he bring the pup home? Or will he leave it like that in the middle of the road?
Out of all the outdoor skills, teaching your kids to behave per the situation is the most important lesson.
While they are outside, always encourage them to practice easy awareness activities. Help them demonstrate what’s above them, below them, and around them. Help them acquire knowledge about the difference between sounds and noises and the noises normal for that place. Also, teach the kind of animals that live in the environment. What to do when they trip and fall. Be playful and encourage their observational skills.
5. Evaluation of Risk and Rewards
A majority of youngsters understand that performing certain things come with specific results. Taking, understanding, and practicing these actions in the outdoor environment are rewarding. So, as a parent, you can set up safe situations for kids to practice their evaluation of risk and reward.
Go out for a walk in the park nearby your location. Ask your kid which route they would want to take – is it the longer and more detailed route, or is it the shorter and easier one? Once you start getting friendly with your kids about risk management, they will get a good outlook about them. So, practice these skills and let your child get prepared to thrive with the survival skills.
Final Thoughts
While these are the basic five survival skills that your kids should learn, don’t miss out on other skills like planting a garden, sharpening knives during emergencies, teaching animal anatomy, and more. Also, it is essential from your end how perfectly you make your kid learn the importance of a first aid kit. In addition, you can also help your kid learn how to build a shelter too. These prerequisites can help your kids overcome their struggles during crucial hours.