Fire, Fire!

If you don't live in Texas you may not have heard about the severe drought we've had this summer or the 63 wildfires that have torched through Central Texas since this past Sunday. Several were large & took days to be contained. Thousands have lost their homes. This past week I had planned to focus our learning on another unit, however with a very teachable moment happening in our community I've changed our lessons. So instead this week we learned all about firefighters, fires and staying safe.

Here is one of our posters for this week. We learned about who fire fighters are & all about their fire engines. We revisited 'stop,drop & roll' and learned about evacuation plans. B dressed like a fire fighter & drove his fire engine tent. He refused pictures, but was a super cute fireman! We didn't get to visit a real fire station because of all the hard work the fire fighters were doing to keep us all safe this past week. We did recently get to see inside a fire engine at a open house for a justice center. Here are a few of those photos...

Trying on fire fighter clothes.

With fire fighters Lt. Tim Wallace & Lt. Ron Corrigan. These guys were awesome, they were so hands on & inviting. Giving him a one on one tour of the engine and equipment. B even got to turn on the lights for the truck...what little kid or parent :) wouldn't love that! We will definitely be going to visit this fire station next time. Every time B hears a siren at his Grandparents house, he always says, 'I bet that's Lt. Tim'. Do you think he made an impression on B or what?

Talking in the headset.

Helping Lt. Ron with the fire hose.

Pattern Sequencing...B surprised me and knew exactly what to do with these!

Shadow Matching, this is a great negative/positive spacial activity.

Our language board

Fire truck puzzle - All these little pieces were in one of B's learning trays, stacked in random order. As he starts to pull the first few pieces out, he says 'how do we put this fire truck puzzle together.' He often narrates his activities. This is not the shocker, I was more impressed with the fact that he had never seen this image before and after only viewing a couple of pieces he was able to conclude that it was suppose to be a fire truck. So he's either using context clues based on the weeks lesson or just has crazy visual recognition.

Fire truck puzzle #2 - Have I mentioned that he LOVES puzzles right now, especially the floor ones. He can put this puzzle together without help in less than five minutes.

*Note B is also wearing his Rescue shirt with the fire engine on it...he was all about fire engines this day.

B got this little fire engine for his last birthday. He mostly likes to turn it on & let it run around the house, crashing into things. *Ah-ha moment* We used our counting blocks to build 'buildings' that were on fire. Then when the fire engine knocked them over, he had put the fires out. Mostly it was just silly fun, but we got some counting in.

Help is on the way...

CRASH! - Fire is out

More fires being put out by the fire engine.

We also checked out library books about fire fighters & engines. Surprisingly, we didn't have any of these kinds of books. We had truck books, that had a few pictures of fire engines but not enough to read about. Here are a few titles if you're looking for some.

Here is the Firefighter

My Mom is a Firefighter

Fire Engines

This is Daniel Cook at the Fire Station

Firefighters to the rescue