Some ideas for having a fire safety conversation with your kids

 

Our fire safety floor plan

There have been some crazy house and building fires in New York recently and it prompted our family to have a meeting about fire safety and review what we would do in case of fire.  Since our kids are only 3 and 1.5 years old, they're not going to be able to do much on their own, but we thought it was important to introduce the idea of fire safety now and plan to have a meeting about it once a year and conversations about fire whenever it feels relevant.  

The basic idea for the kids was if there's smoke, stay low since smoke rises and close the door.  That's what a firefighter at our local firehouse said my 3 year old was capable of getting at this point.

But in addition to that, our family...

-Drew a fire safety floor plan that showed the two exits from each room as well as how to exit the apartment building

-Came up with a family meeting place in the case that we all had to leave our apartment

-Pointed out the smoke detectors and tested them and talked about how they work

-Talked about how a fire ladder and fire extinguisher works.  (We have this fire ladder since we live on the third floor of a condo building.  We have one of these fire extinguishers.)

-Watched a kids fire safety video we found online (below)

I don't know how much kids absorbed, but it felt good that we had talked about it. 

We watched this video (screen grab above)

Discussing the exits out of the apartment