One of the primary objectives of this toolkit is to shift the attitudes of children in Alberta towards embracing safety and injury prevention. By using interactive educational activities, making safety fun, and building connections to the home and to the community, we want to support children so that they can make choices to keep themselves free from life-altering injury. By encouraging children to practice a culture of safety from a young age, it is expected that students will adopt and apply these values throughout their lives. When children make informed decisions about how to protect themselves from unintentional injuries, the incidence and severity of injuries will decrease and lessen the impact on individuals, family members, and society at large.

Through education and by creating encouraging and motivating environments, people can be persuaded to change their attitudes, and ultimately, their behaviours. Attitudes are the ways in which we evaluate things in the world around us.⁶ The attitudes we hold can have an impact on the things we believe and on the things we do; that is, our attitudes can influence our behaviours.

The developers of this toolkit considered two theoretical models regarding behaviour change:

According to the Health Belief Model,⁷ people are motivated to adopt prevention behaviours by the beliefs and perceptions they hold about their risk of a health problem - for example, an injury - and their perceptions about how they will benefit from taking action to avoid it. The Health Belief Model can be used to determine which variables the educational messages and strategies should be aimed at to influence behaviour change.

The Social Cognitive Theory^7,8 is based on the premise that behaviour change occurs in a social context in which an individual is continually receiving feedback from other people and the environment. People gather this feedback by observing what others around them are doing. Individuals then process this information together with beliefs about their ability to exert control over their own behaviour, motivation and social environment, and their self-efficacy. This then allows them to make the changes and alter expectations about how the behaviour change will impact them.

The toolkit uses observational learning in its hands-on activities in the different topic areas to enable students to experience the ways to prevent injuries. The students become more likely to perform the described actions to avoid injuries as they see important opportunities to choose safer ways to enjoy their activities. Students come away with a framework to engage in conversations with friends and families and to become role models for peers regarding preventing injuries.