How your students can learn about fire safety in a memorable and meaningful way!
You can’t celebrate fire safety week in preschool without spending time exploring firetrucks! My preschoolers absolutely love firetrucks and so this post is dedicated to our fun with firetrucks throughout the week…
Our Firetruck Book
Let’s start with the book we read. I chose the book “Fire Truck” by Peter Sis. This is a funny book and an informative book about a little boy who loves firetrucks so much that he turns into a firetruck…
The book gives some fun details about firetrucks and is a fun story to tell, too…
Firetrucks on the Light Table
All around the classroom, we provided a variety of ways to explore firetrucks and the colors of fire. At the light table, the children drew lines with firetrucks on our fire sensory bags…
The plastic baggies were filled with about a teaspoon of red, yellow and black paint to represent fire or colors we commonly associate with firefighters and firetrucks. Â The baggies were sealed and taped to the light table with clear packing tape and the children could use their hands or the fire trucks to create lines in the paint, mix the colors of paint, and enjoy the sensory experience of the paint inside the bags…
Paper Firetrucks at the Art Table…
The children also made their own construction paper firetrucks. This was a simple process of gluing basic shapes to form their own firetruck…
The children could add lines for ladders as well…
And they were invited to add other details to their trucks…
The paper firetrucks were a fun way for the children to create their own version a firetruck and then draw the details that they found most interesting or important…
Firetruck Painting
The children loved painting with firetrucks, too! We set out the red, yellow and brown paint for the children to roll their firetrucks through…
Some of the children decided to add a few cars to their firetruck paintings as well…
In our preschool class, anything that can be rolled through paint is always a big hit…
Firetruck Dramatic Play
The children also spent time driving firetrucks around our colorful fire stations and parking lots…
To make our fire stations, we taped several paper bricks together. We made four fire stations and each was a different color with a different number on the top. Â We also created a parking lot with colored tape to go with each fire station…
The children came and went through out the morning. This type of center is a good way to invite the children to spend time together driving, talking, negotiating, pretending, and creating their own rules for play…
After preschool, my grandsons spent more time playing with the fire stations…
And eventually the fire stations were dismantled from all that play…
DIY Firetrucks
And a big hit of the week were our DIY cardboard box firetrucks…
I found the perfect boxes for making firetrucks and my assistants painted them and added a few details to make the boxes look like firetrucks. Â We cut two holes in the bottom of each box that the children could slip through and added handles on the side of each fire truck for the children to hold onto as they walked around…
We used our DIY firetrucks both indoors and outdoors. Â On our first day of using the firetrucks, it was raining pretty good outside and so the children drove the trucks around our small classroom.
Let me say it was more like bumper firetrucks but the children didn’t care…
By the next day, we had pretty weather outside so the firetruck driving was a little more fun with lots of space to drive around…
Real Firetrucks
There are so many ways to explore firetrucks and of course, the best way to explore firetrucks is to go inside of a real firetruck which is exactly what we did!
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