Teaching children what to do in case of Fire
Today’s article is credited to my child who taught us all last night what we need to do in case of a fire.
Once a week we spend time as a family without any distractions. There are no friends allowed to come over. We take this time to become closer to each other. We always have an activity that we do together and we rotate who is in charge. I felt that we needed to go over what to do in case of a fire in the house. Getting children to sit down for more than a minute can be a challenge. If you figured out how to get more than one minute please share your secrets. My thoughts are to involve the children as much as possible. I knew if I talked to them about this they would tune me out, so one of my children was assigned to teach everyone. The second thought was to make it fun. Him and I sat down on Sunday night and planned out what he was going to teach everyone. Below are his notes. I would like to share with you what my boy taught me last night.
STEP 1: HOW TO GET OUT OF THE HOUSE
The first item everyone needs to know is how to get out of the house. We decided to make this one fun with two different activities. The first was to make sure everyone is rewarded for their participation. We started in the basement and went all the way to the second floor. Anytime someone could show us a way to get out of the house they got to pick a candy from the candy bucket. There are only two ways out of the second story, the stairs or the windows. For most small kids jumping out of a two story window is scary. We have a fold up ladder so the kids can throw it down the side of the house and get out safely. They enjoyed taking the ladder out and seeing how it worked. You would have thought it was Christmas. The last thing is we established a meeting place once we got out of the house. Once you are out of the house you never go back in. So here are the items to remember about getting out of the house.
1. Make sure everyone knows all the exits.
2. Have all the tools, if necessary, to get safely out of the house.
3. Have a primary and alternate meeting place.
STEP 2: WHAT TO DO IF YOUR DOOR IS SHUT
You never open the door until you know that there is no fire on the other side of the door. There are three steps you need to take before you can open the door. These are steps 3, 4 and 5 on his notes.
1. Check the door for smoke. If you see smoke coming underneath the door or through the cracks, do not open the door.
2. Check the door for heat. If the door is hot or warm, do not open the door.
3. Check the door handle for heat. If the door handle is hot or warm, do not open the door.
If there is no smoke and no heat, then open that door and use your escape routes and get out as fast as possible. Make sure that this part is interactive with the kids. We had each of them go up and show us how to check all three multiple times. They need to do things again and again to be familiar with how to do it.
STEP 3: GET DOWN
Smoke rises. The biggest reason people die is because of smoke inhalation. The safest way is to get down and low so you don’t inhale the smoke. The way he taught us this was through having races. We all got on our knees and had races around the house. It was great being behind everyone screaming fire and seeing them scramble like little stink bugs.
STEP 4: STOP, DROP AND ROLL
If your clothes catch on fire, and let’s hope they don’t, you need to know how to put out the flames. Running for a hose while on fire may not be the best. The fastest way to put them out is to stop where you are at, drop to the ground and roll until those flames are put out. You are basically smothering the flames. With this activity we did have one minor casualty. We had everyone stop, drop and roll in the same room. The kids enjoyed this but it soon turned into a giant steamroller game and the littlest kid got steamrolled by another.
The best thing I saw from this lesson was that the kids kept asking questions. Some of these questions were far out, but it showed that they were into it. The reason for this was that they were actively involved the whole time. It has to be fun and interactive otherwise they will probably forget it the next day.
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