The following post was written by editor Kara Fleck.
October is National Fire Safety Month. This is the perfect time to start getting into the habit of a monthly home fire drill or to polish up your existing procedure, if your family already has one in place.
On a regular basis, the kids and I talk about fire safety, discussing what to do in a fire, and we have been doing an at-home fire drill every month. Still, it has been very eye-opening to me just how much they forget from month to month when we do our fire drills. That tells me how important it is that we keep this habit.
This month, we’re brushing up on fire safety and I’m using some resources from around the web to help us prepare.
Fire Drill
These will probably vary for each family, depending on the ages of your children, but just to give you some ideas and get the conversations started, here are my goals for our home fire drills:
- To review our two different escape routes
- To stress that we need to get out and then stay out!
- Learning why we need to crawl low under smoke, and then practicing our crawling
- Checking doors for heat before opening them
- Assigning a meeting place (our neighbor’s drive way across the street)
- Calling 9-1-1 after you are out of the house
- Setting off the smoke alarm so we can hear what it sounds like
- Checking the batteries in our smoke detectors
- Practicing our fire drill a few times – not just talking about it, but actually doing it
