Road Safety: Kinds of Traffic Signs

Eight lettered road signs fill the top of this 2nd grade page in two rows, each on its own post, and two sorting panels sit at the bottom, Rule signs and Warning signs, with four dashed boxes each. The child writes the letter of every sign into the boxes of its group. The sheet shown mixes a no bicycles sign and a no walking sign, both white squares with a red circle and slash, the YIELD triangle and the STOP octagon with four yellow warnings: a walking person, a traffic signal, a bicycle and the five-sided school sign.

Sorting signs by kind is where road safety starts to become a system rather than a list. Rule signs tell you what you must or must not do and are mostly red and white; warning signs tell you what is ahead and are yellow, usually diamonds. A second grader who has learned that pattern can make a sensible guess about a sign they have never seen. The page pairs signs that share a picture across the two groups, a walking person as a warning and a crossed-out walking person as a rule, so color and shape have to carry the decision rather than the picture.

One sheet, eight signs, eight letters. Both panels have exactly four boxes, which tells children how many belong in each group; if you want the sort to be harder, have them list the letters on a separate strip instead. Afterwards, ask them to invent a sign for the classroom and decide which group it belongs in. The quiz face comes after this one and uses the same sign table.