Fire safety is an important topic to discuss with kids of all ages. You want them to know what to do in an emergency,  but you don’t want to scare them into worrying all the time. The book Stop, Drop and Roll by Margery Cuyler is a great resource for introducing kids to fire safety with care. It also provides a great opportunity to have some fun while learning some important skills.

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Stop Drop and Roll (A Book about Fire Safety) by Margery Cuyler tells the story of Jessica, a very worried little girl who is learning about fire safety. During fire prevention week, her teacher presents the class with a variety of fire safety rules. The story offers these tips in small pieces so parents can discuss each bit with their kids. As Jessica tries to remember the words “stop, drop and roll”, kids will be entertained by the mixed up words she comes up with instead! In the end, Jessica gets her family on board with the fire prevention rules and successfully teaches the rest of the school how to stop, drop and roll. 

Since October is fire prevention month, this book provides parents with an opportunity to teach kids about fire safety tips!

Escape Plan – Make sure your family has an escape plan! Have a meeting place set up so that everyone knows where they should go in the case of a fire. Once you have your meeting place set, ask kids every so often if they remember where it is. I still remember where our meeting place was when I was a kid! Point out to kids where the smoke detectors are in the house, and have a fire drill to ensure that everyone knows what to do!

Stop, Drop and Roll – Have kids practice stopping, dropping and rolling. You can also practice crawling across a room to avoid smoke overhead. This is an important thing for kids to remember, but they can also have fun rolling around on the floor!

Sensory Play – Place a plastic box or house/barn into a sensory table or tub. Have kids help you to spray shaving cream on top of the building. Use a spatula to make peaks in the shaving cream so it looks like flames. Using liquid watercolors or food coloring, add red and orange colors to the top of the peaks. Once the building looks like it is on fire, have kids use squirt bottles, spray bottles or a watering can filled with water to cover the flames and “put the fire out”! Kids will love to see how the water makes the flames disappear!

Stop, drop and roll your way through an obstacle course!

Fireman Obstacle Course – Firemen have to be able to do a lot while they are wearing their gear, so they train on a lot of obstacles to do their job right. Set up an obstacle course for your kids based on fire safety tips! Kids can crawl through a tunnel (either a pop up tunnel, a big cardboard box, or one made of blankets), climb a small ladder, slide down a slide or pole, and stop, drop and roll. You can set this up with obstacles appropriate for your child’s skill set, and throw in extra activities. You could have the kids drag a hose with them through the tunnel, or have them spray a hose or spray bottle at flames on a play house, or flames drawn in chalk on a fence or the ground. There are many ways to adapt this activity for your child.

Fireman Math & Sight Words – The blog Coffee Cups and Crayons had a great idea for using fake fire hoses and chalk to learn math facts, sight words or letter recognition. She wrote the letters, sight words or math facts on the fence along with chalk flames, and had her kids use “fire hose” squirt guns to put out the fire. This combines fire safety and pretend play with math and language skills in a fun and easy way!

Meet your local firemen!

Visit a Fire Station – Look into your local fire stations and see if they have tours available or an open house. Our local departments all have fire prevention open houses during the month of October where kids can look around the fire hall, check out the trucks and see the tools that the firemen use.

Fire prevention is an important thing to continually talk to your kids about. This story and these activities gives kids an opportunity to learn these important things while still having fun and enjoying themselves!

Do you have a family plan? What do you do to talk to your kids about fire safety?

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