How to Teach Internet Safety to Younger Elementary Students
A lesson plan for helping students as young as kindergarten begin to understand how to be safe online.
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A few years ago, I wrote a post called “Teaching Digital Citizenship in the Elementary Classroom.” Now I want to share a sample lesson for teaching internet safety to students as young as kindergarten. Yes, you read correctly—kindergarten.
With children spending time online at younger and younger ages, it’s vital that we explicitly teach young children how to protect themselves online. Most young children get the “stranger danger” talk at school, so they know about how to handle strangers in their neighborhood and in face-to-face situations.
There are three considerations when addressing internet safety with these students. First, the transfer of knowledge about how to handle strangers in real life to those in virtual environments is not automatic. It needs to be taught. Second, while most stranger danger programs teach that strangers are scary and mean and want to hurt or abduct children, this contradicts the way collaboration occurs between strangers online. Not all strangers are dangerous. Lastly, in real life students can walk or run away from a potential threat. In an online environment, the danger is inside a student’s home and hard to escape if they don’t have the skills necessary for handling tough situations.
Protecting Private Information Online
This is a lesson I’ve done with my kindergarten and first-grade students to introduce the idea that strangers exist on the internet and to discuss how we should interact with them. You’ll need a computer and internet access, and it’s helpful to have a projector or interactive whiteboard so these questions can be projected on the screen during the discussion. Ask students these questions:
Have students watch the Internet Safety video at BrainPOP Jr. Afterward, ask them to share what they learned from the movie. After soliciting some answers, review vocabulary from the video using the Word Play activity on the site. Next, have them complete the Write About It activity.
There are a few ways to check and make sure your students have understood the lesson: