Teaching Through Themes: Fire Safety Week

This past week we learned all about fire safety. In preparation for this week, I had a discussion with my class about fire safety and learned we had a lot of misconceptions. Our fall break (yay!) fell during the middle of that week so I decided to postpone it so that we could spend a full week learning how to be safe.

Click on the picture to go to NFPA's website

We started off the week by talking about our schema and what questions we had about firefighters and fire safety. Then we spent some time looking at non-fiction text to help us label an color a firefighter and fire truck. Looking closely at non-fiction text has helped us realize that we can get our questions answered through books. It has also helped us label and have our colors make sense in our pictures when writing.

We had some fun making a replica of a hook and ladder truck! We used Boo Berry cereal as the firefighter driving the truck and a small marshmallow as a siren.

 Then, we made firefighter hats and put out some fires. I found this idea here and had to do it! We took a field trip to one of the fire extinguishers in our school to check it out. Then we made a fire out of tissue paper in our cups. We added baking soda and sprayed in vinegar to watch the "fire extinguisher" put out the fire.  

Can we say fun?! We also read a firefighter emergent reader so we could practice sight words and vocabulary.  

And our shared reading was all about being safe if there is a fire. Here is one of the pages:

Throughout the week we also played this great firefighter game from consumersafety.org

What do you do for Fire Safety Week?

Happy Teaching!