Lets face it, sometimes our jobs can begin to feel like one big risk assessment and risk assessments can get pretty boring. It is also good practice to have a fresh pair of eyes risk assess your site and to give the young people you work with the opportunity to assess their own risk. As the young people grow with you they will start to use their own internal thermometer to assess risk and they will be used to risky play and the benefits it has but the EYFS children will still be at the development stage of not knowing if something is risky for them or not. Therefore, getting them involved in assessing and grading those risks can be incredibly beneficial. I tend to do this using red, green and orange triangles as the EYFS children find this easy to understand.
You can lead this activity in many different ways but I find it works best as follows:
Send the children off in pairs to find something within the area that they think could be dangerous. Discuss these.
Introduce the red, green and yellow colours and discuss how these relate to not dangerous/not risky, some danger/risk and very dangerous/risky.
Send the children off with 1 triangle of each colour and ask them to find one area, apparatus, or object that they believe matches the colour of the triangle and place the triangle on the object.
Gather children together, discuss and feedback
Try to keep referring back to the red, green and yellow triangles with the younger groups until the point where you observe their understanding of the risks on site ie through conversation, team work etc.