Toby the Teddy by Catherine Buckley and Amelia Harrison (Review)

At the beginning of this term I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Toby the Teddy by Catherine Buckley and Amelia Harrison. 

The aim of Toby the Teddy is to inform children about when and how to call for an ambulance in an emergency. This tied in perfectly with our current PDHPE focus on people who help us. 

As a lead up to reading the story we had brainstormed people in our community who help us. The most common people mentioned were policemen and ambulance drivers.

Following this I used the 'People Who Help Us' powerpoint from Twinkl to guide deeper discussion. Find it here.

I then asked my students when they thought they should ring an ambulance. It was during this activity that I realised how important this book was! Some of their responses were:

• When they fall over and cut their knees
• When a bug bites them
• When their teeth fall out on the playground (I think this came from an incident where a student fell of the monkey bars, knocked out a tooth and broke their arm. An ambulance was called that day!)
• If they feel sick in the stomach
• If they break their leg

Following this we read the story. As each scenario arose I prompted my students to tell me if they thought Toby needed to call an ambulance. I asked them to justify why they thought he should or shouldn't call an ambulance. The book provided the perfect foundation for quality discussions about when and how to call an ambulance.

Following reading the story we went back and looked at the list we had made about when to ring an ambulance. We crossed off the instances when we should not call an ambulance and added a few new scenarios about when we should call an ambulance.

The focus of the next lesson was to practise calling 000. To go with the book the authors have create a handy fridge magnet that you can record your personal details on for children to use if they do have to call an ambulance. This is a great reminder for all children. The awesome SLSO in my classroom and I then worked with each student to write down and memorise their address.

At first we used an old cordless phone in from our toy box to practise calling 000. Then I realised that most of the students in my class don't actually have home phones so we got extra tricky and practised with my iPhone. 

The follow up activities that we completed included writing about different real life experiences that my students had had and whether or not they needed to call an ambulance. They published their work using the ambulance writing frames from Twinkl (here).

While my SLSO and I worked one on one with each student to practise reciting their address my students also completed the ambulance colouring in pages below.

Overall I would definitely recommend Toby the Teddy to any parent or teacher who wants to ensure their child has a clear understanding of both when to call and ambulance and how to call an ambulance. 

Twinkl now offers an ever growing range of resources developed specifically for use within Australia. I was able to find a number of resources that related to this text and were relevant to Australian students.

Toby the Teddy is endorsed by the organisations below:

To purchase your own copy of Toby the Teddy click here. 

To see what Twinkl is all about click here. 

Disclosure: I received a free copy of Toby the Teddy and an upgraded membership from Twinkl in return for a review. All views and opinions are my own.