ORGANIZATION MISSION STATEMENT

The mission of the lil' iguana Children's Safety Foundation is to promote, instruct, and provide a blueprint affecting healthy behaviors and smart choices for young children.

General Program Description

A safe and happy childhood lasts a lifetime. Childhood experiences are the building blocks and necessary components of healthy emotional development in the adolescent and young adult years. Considering sound child development research, the Foundation has created a series of live, interactive, and creative stage shows for children ages one to eight promoting safety, self-preservation, and well being. Through active participation in skits, songs, dance, and stories, the youngsters learn fundamental strategies to help keep them from harm.

The lil' iguana's Children's Safety Foundation conducts these programs because they provide a learning laboratory where children can take the words and warnings they hear everyday from their parents and caregivers and put them into concrete actions in a safe, and simulated situation. There are many unique features to this series. Safety is defined in terms of a child's overall well being. It is not limited to the threat of molestation, abuse, or accidental injury. The youngster who is physically or developmentally challenged has lil' iguana to help him tell his classmates he is no different than they are.

lil' iguana offers this series as a reinforcement to parents in their quest to keep their children from harm. The specific actions presented in the stage shows and videos demonstrate what questions a child can ask himself to identify a harmful situation, to remove himself from the circumstances, or to eliminate the danger or threat. For example, parents say to their three-year-old child, "Don't talk to strangers." What many parents do not realize is that a small child will not consider an adult a stranger if the adult knows his or her name. This is why it is not a good idea to have a child's name printed on the outside of a tee shirt. The six-year-old is not able to understand that a suspicious adult may have called him by his first name because he read it on a tee shirt.

Recently a three-year-old child in the city of Nashua, New Hampshire was able to avert molestation. He told his parents, "I remembered what the lil' iguana taught me at preschool."

Program Detail

What are the goals and purposes of the program?

The goals of the program are:

• To keep our children from harm by providing education, information, and simulation exercises to ensure their safety and well being.

• To develop social and civic responsibility in children.

• To help parents and childcare givers establish a solid basis of security, self-confidence, and optimism in a child.

What are the objectives of the program? Are they measurable?

Each individual component of the program has its own set of objectives that support the program's overall goals. For example, the stranger danger module teaches children to "run, yell and tell." The objective is to instill in the child the language and actions needed to recognize and react to a potentially harmful situation.

All objectives are measurable. The "run, yell and tell" objective is measured through an informal verbal pretest determining the level of knowledge already possessed by the class. In order to ascertain how much of the presentation the children remember, a post-test is administered after the activities. Retention over time can be measured by an additional post-test several weeks after the first presentation. This test can be administered by the class teacher or during a surprise visit by lil' iguana. This evaluates the effectiveness of the individual component or module and the program.

What are the specific activities that must be carried out to meet objectives? Are they on schedule?

There are specific, interactive activities for each objective. For instance, during the lil' iguana's song, skit, and verse of "Run, Yell & Tell", children are asked to participate with lil' iguana. Someone approaches the children in a "car", which simulates a real-life situation and they are asked to demonstrate what they would do to avoid this scenario. This has proven to be a most effective method of comprehension.

Who are the members of the staff who will carry out the program? What are their backgrounds and qualifications? The members of the staff who will carry out this program are certified teachers, police officers, curriculum specialists, educational researchers, and media specialists. Resumes are provided upon request.

What is the relationship of this program to your organization's overall mission?