The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of safety education activities through storytelling on young children''s ability to solve safety problems and express their language.

1. How does safety education activities through storytelling affect young children''s ability to solve safety problems?

2. What effects does safety education activities through storytelling have on young children''s language expression?

This study conducted an experimental study to investigate the effects of safety education activities through storytelling on young children''s ability to solve safety problems and express their language. For this purpose, 44 children aged 5 (22 experimental group and 22 comparative group) attending S kindergarten in G city were selected as subjects. The experimental treatment of this study was conducted 14 times over 11 weeks except for kindergarten vacation from June 7 to August 27, 2021. Both the experimental group and the comparative group were held during the morning hours (10:00~111:20) of the day of kindergarten. The experimental group and the comparative group were selected and added the 7 standard contents of the school safety education of the Ministry of Education among the annual safety education activities of kindergarten. The experimental group was conducted as safety education activities through storytelling.
In order to verify the educational effects of safety education activities through storytelling, this study conducted safety problem solving ability and language expression ability test. To measure the safety problem solving ability of children, the test tool was used which was modified and supplemented by Kwak Eun-bok(2000) and Kim Mi-jung(2018) and supplemented by Kim Yoon-jung(2019) to the contents of Scott(1992)''s Prevention Injury(A safety curriculum for preschool-kindergarten). This tool was measured before and after 17 questions as sub-factors of ''playing safely'', ''keeping traffic safety rules'' and ''appropriately coping in emergency''. To measure the language expression ability of young children, the test tool made by Jang Young-ae (1981) and modified and supplemented by Hong Ji-won (2014) was used. This tool consists of two scenes: ''decorating a story with content'' and ''decorating a story with connection''. It consists of seven sub-test items. The data were processed using SPSS Win 25.0 program to process the collected data in the following way. First, Cronbach''s coefficient was calculated to investigate the reliability of the research tool. Second, independent sample t-test was conducted to verify the homogeneity of the safety problem solving ability and language expression ability of the experimental group and the comparative group. Third, in order to verify the effect of safety education activities through storytelling on children''s safety problem solving ability and language expression ability, the ANCOVA was conducted to compare the two groups of post-test scores as covariates, considering the possibility that the pre-test scores have some influence on the post-test scores, although the average difference between the groups was not large in the pre-test.
The results of this study are as follows. First, as a result of examining the effects of early childhood safety education activities through storytelling on safety problem solving ability, it was found that it had a positive effect on ''playing safely'', ''keeping traffic safety rules'', and ''appropriately coping with emergency situations'', and the score of the experimental group was statistically significant compared to the score of the comparative group. This suggests that the safety problem solving ability can be improved when applying the safety education activities through storytelling to the early childhood education field, which means that it has educational value. Second, as a result of examining the effects of early childhood safety education activities through storytelling on language expression ability, it was found that the five scenes of ''decorating stories with content'' and ''decorating stories with connection'' had a positive effect, and the scores of the experimental group were statistically significant compared to those of the comparative group. This suggests that the educational value is that the language expression ability can be improved when the infant safety education activities through storytelling are applied to the early childhood education field.
In conclusion, the safety education activities of young children through storytelling had a positive effect on the ability to solve safety problems and the ability to express language. In other words, the early childhood safety education activity through storytelling was an activity with educational value and advantages as a teaching medium that improves safety problem solving ability and language expression ability. Therefore, it is necessary to actively utilize and pay attention to the safety education activities of young children through storytelling in order to improve the ability to solve safety problems and express language.