First Aid and Fire Safety (Day 3-4)

Fire Safety 

We were quite overdue for a review of some basic fire safety rules.  Even though we've lived here for a year and a half, we hadn't made a family meeting spot outside in case of emergency. Nor had we gone over in detail how the kids can escape from their room in case of emergency.

We talked about what to do if your clothes or hair catches fire. Stop! Drop! Roll!  One source suggests covering your eyes.  We also talked about how to help if someone is on fire. Making sure to issue the orders to stop, drop and roll. To get something like a blanket to cover them, roll them, and smother the fire.  Once again we all took turns calling 9-1-1 and giving our name, address and describing the emergency situation.

 We then talked about being low to the ground if the room were smokey. We practiced crawling quickly across the room. We also talked about checking a door before opening it to see if it were hot to the touch.  We talked about how oxygen feeds a fire.

 Next we went to each person's room and had them see if they could escape through their window if need be.
This was especially important for ED because her window is tough for her to open because of her height. We had her practice pushing the window down by using a couple of board books.

 We wrote out some our fire safety tips and then I had the kids go over all of them with Dad. Dad brought up a good point about what to do in case of a forest fire (since just six months ago a neighbor lost their house to a forest fire). Dad also suggested that we have a fire drill one day soon. 

We went around testing our smoke alarms.  

ED really liked this simple preschool page about fire safety. There's a screenshot to the left. I wasn't impressed, but she wanted to do it over and over which is what matters, right?!

Finally we talked about what to do in a smoke-filled room.  We talked about how difficult it would be to see and how you need to stay very low to the ground. Then the kids did one of their favorite activities... one we do most every time we talk about fire safety. They took turns crawling blindfolded through a maze of objects trying to get to safety. It's a fun activity, but they really do *get it* and remember that they would have to stay low or crawl in case of a fire.