A Fire and Life Safety Program
in Elementary Schools

Northwest Fire District’s Fire and Life Safety Educators visit preschools, kindergartens, and second and fourth grade classrooms with lessons designed to teach youngsters the skills they need to react properly when faced with a life safety situation.

Lessons include how to make a home escape plan, calling 911, burn prevention and treatment, recognizing household hazards, and electrical, water and bicycle safety. Students are especially fascinated by burned items from real fires that are brought in by the educators: they understand the need to crawl low and get out quickly when they see that a fire’s intense heat can melt a television and its dark smoke can leave it covered in black soot.

Prevention Programs for Preschools

Northwest Fire educators visit district preschools to teach youngsters safety information, including what to do when the smoke alarm goes off or if their clothes catch on fire. A variety of teaching methods are utilized, including puppets, games, safety songs, and videos.

An important part of the preschool education involves children seeing the firefighters “dress up” in their turnout gear. In a fire, a young child may be terrified by smoke and heat and try to hide in a closet or under the bed. A firefighter crawling through the smoke dressed in turnouts and breathing through an oxygen tank that makes him sound like “Darth Vader” can add to a child’s terror unless he understand that there is a person in there coming to help him.