Fire Safety Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

Fire Ladder Learning Activities

October 6, 2013 By Deirdre

Today begins Fire Safety Week! To celebrate Fire Safety Week along with Fire Prevention Month I placed a fire truck ladder made of tape down a hall on the first floor of the house. When my husband asked what we were going to do with the ladder, I told him that JDaniel and I would brainstorm ways to use it.I hadn’t really thought about how we would use it initially. It was just time to take up the hallway numbers that had been going down the hallway for a couple of months. It did know that between JDaniel and I we would come up with a wide range of ideas.

Pretend Play

The first idea we came up with was to pretend to climb up the ladder. It looks easier than it is. You have to get down on all fours. Then you reach for the next rung and climb and reach and climb. Young knees may not feel the challenge of moving along a wood floor. Old mom knees felt the challenge!It was fun to pretend to be a fireman climbing the ladder. Climbing horizontally instead of vertically was new and unique.

Number Recognition

Calling out the numbers on a flashcards one at a time in order to move up a rung of the ladder was a simple way to review numbers. Early learners may want to work on the numbers 0-20. Older learners might want to work on larger two or maybe even three digit numbers. We worked on a variety of numbers.

Counting On

Agreeing on a number you want to start counting with on the bottom rung and then counting on until you reach the top of ladder is a second way we worked on number recognition.Some children like to start counting by counting from 1 on up to the number they need to start with. This is one of those learning activities that can help them wrap their brains around starting at the agreed number and going on. It helped us build a foundation for counting on.

Math Facts

Reviewing addition facts by starting on the bottom rung with first addend and then stepping up one rung at a time while adding the second addend is a lot of fun.Hint: You may find that you need to make more rungs or a longer ladder if you are working beyond early addition facts. We had fun adding movement to simple addition facts.

If you want to work on subtraction facts, you could move down the ladder instead of up or by taking steps backwards.

Sight Words

Just as you moved forward a rung by recognizing numbers, you could move up the ladder one rung at a time as you read sight words. Reviewing sight words is not always exciting. Putting on a fire hat and firemen’s raincoat and climbing rungs of a tape ladder can make reviewing them more fun.

Conclusion

The idea of doing fire ladder learning activities is to get children moving while learning. Some children enjoy getting up out of their seats to learn often. Others may be able to sit for longer periods of time, but need some variety of leaning activities offered to them. Either way fire ladder learning activities are fun and allow children to learn in a new way.

Fire Truck Craft

October 6, 2013 By Deirdre

One of the fun things I have been doing to help JDaniel’s class this year has been to help with the SEEDS program. It is right up my alley. The program is like Read.Explore.Learn. and you know how much I love to explore books.

I decided to share a fire truck theme book with them called Meeow and the Big Box is about a kitten who uses a big box to create a fire truck for pretend play. We first heard this book shared at a library storytime focused on fire safety. The librarian created a visual using a box that walked us through each of Meeow’s steps. The children just loved this book.

Creating the Fire Truck Craft

I only get about half an hour to read the book and do the craft. To save time I try to have everything cut out and ready to glue down. I even do a trial run on my own or with JDaniel to time it. He loves getting to be a guinea pig for his class.

Here is how the trial for this craft turned out:

First, we put the body of the fire truck on black paper. Then JDaniel added the windows and white bumper area. I think I could have cut a long strip for the bumper. It didn’t stick out very far in the front or back of the fire truck. I may need to make these a little longer for the class.

The windows for the fire truck were moved around a lot. JDaniel had ideas about where they needed to go and not go a couple of times. They really could go anywhere on the front of a fire truck and could be turned vertically or horizontally. I think not having a specific place for the windows gives the children can invite to make their trucks unique.

After working on the windows, JDaniel worked on adding the yellow accessories to the truck. The ladder could have gone anywhere on the truck or even on the roof of the truck. Both of the lights could have gone on the top or on the front. The trial run ended up with one of the top and one on the bottom.

The last thing to go on the fire truck craft was the wheels. I am not sure that fire trucks have brown wheels, but black wheels would have blended into the black background so, I went with brown.

I think it will be fun to do this craft with JDaniel’s class. We had fun working on it together. It would also be great to create with your children during National Fire Safety Month in October. They would probably like to read Meeow and the Big Box and make a fire truck too.

Read.Explore.Learn. – Fire Safety Themed Activites

October 4, 2013 By Deirdre

October is Fire Prevention Month. JDaniel loved to climb all over a fire truck when it came the library for Fire Prevention Month. Now that he is in school all day we can’t head over for story time and the fire truck’s visit. I decided to share with you and him fire themed learning activities and book designed to help children learn about fire safety.

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Most children love fire trucks, dalmatian dogs, and well everything that is fire safety related except maybe fire alarms. Sparky the Fire Dog is a book filled with cute and informative pictures about a dog how he keeps safe.This books opens great discussions about fire safety and what children need to do encase of a fire. It is written in such a way that it doesn’t scare kids or place ideas in their heads about fire that they don’t need there.

Fire Safety Themed Activities to do After Reading the Book

Fire Roll and Count 1-20

Fire Safety Themed Activities - Roll and Cover Fire Truck

One of the areas JDaniel is working on at school is number recognition. He can count almost to 100 without skipping numbers, but recognizing numbers can be a challenge. I decided to focus this number recognition game of the numbers 1-20. He is actually good at recognizing most of the numbers in that range. I thought introducing a new number game would be easier with number he knew most of the numbers. I can always go back and put in more challenging numbers on the board later.

Fire Truck Roll and Cover 1-20

The game is really easy to play. You simply roll the three die and then you count the dots displayed on the dice. Once you have the number, you place a red button on the number.

I like using buttons for game board pieces. They are great for fine motor skills and the game board came we used again and again because it is mark free.

Options:

You could use any of the following to mark the game board permanently if you like:

bingo marker
magic marker
pencil
crayon

You could also put the boards in a plastic sleeve and mark on the sleeve instead of the board itself.

You could used dice with number instead of dots to make the adding more challenging.

Fire Safety Lotus Chart

Fire Safety Themed Activities - Lotus Chart

JDaniel’s teacher mentioned that they will be using lotus charts a lot this year. I wasn’t familiar with them and how they were used when she mentioned them at Back to School night so, I googled them. A lotus chart contains a central box that displays the theme or concept of the chart. Around the center box words or pictures can be placed that illustrate the concept or theme.

I created a lotus chart that JDaniel and I could used to display fire safety words. The wonderful thing about doing a chart like this while exploring a book is that you can look back in the book for words that you want to use and how to spell them.

This is not one of my a fire safety themed activities focused on math, but I thought you would like to see it.

Fire Dog Number Count

Fire Safety Themed Activities - Spot Counting

This is more of a preschool center activity than one for kindergartners, but I love how cute it turned out. JDaniel didn’t have any trouble placing the correct number of button onto each dog to give it spots. I guess I could have made it harder by giving him bigger numbers and bigger dogs to put the buttons on.

Free Worksheets

I get comments all the time about wanting to have the handout or worksheet we have used to explore books. Up until now I have been sharing them. Not because I didn’t want to share them, but because I haven’t taken the time to create PDFs of them.

This week I have copies of the Fire Roll and Count game and the Fire Safety Lotus Charts. All you have to do is click on this Fire Themed Learning Activities and they are your.

What books are you exploring this week?