Teaching Fire Prevention in Your Home

Thank you First Alert for sponsoring this post. October is Fire Prevention Month - practice safety in numbers to ensure your family’s super prepared too!

Fire prevention and fire safety have been a passion of mine for most of my life. I remember in third grade my school held a fire prevention poster contest with all the other schools in my city, and my poster won first place! I got to go to the fire station for the day, ride the fire truck, have cake with the fire fighters, the whole nine yards. After that moment I was hooked, and it's been something that I've taken very seriously ever since.

Facts About Fire and CO Safety

Now that my kids are four and six, they're at the age where they're really starting to grasp fire safety topics, and we can start talking about it on a bigger scale with our kids. Did you know that in the US over 100 million homes aren't protected with smoke alarms, and that 3 of every 5 home fire deaths come from a home with 0 smoke alarms. 

Alarms provide early warning in case of a fire, so it's crucial to make sure that your's are working properly. You should test your alarms and replace batteries as needed every six months. To eliminate the need for battery replacement, upgrade to First Alert's 10-year sealed battery alarms. 

Carbon Monoxide is also something you should be teaching your children about too. CO poisoning is the number one cause of accidental death. Because it's odorless, tasteless, and invisible, it cannot be detected unless you have an alarm. 

How to Teach Your Kids About Fire and CO Safety

One way that Derek and I teach our kids about important topics they need to know are through weekly Family Home Evenings. We hold these every Monday night, and during the month of October, we plan on dedicating one of these nights to learning about Fire Safety.

If you log onto the First Alert website, you can find so many valuable teaching tools. They an entire section dedicated to, "The Super Prepared Family", where you can find animated informational videos to share with your children, activity pages to print and color, and many more valuable resources.

After you take your kids through the information on the First Alert website, it's important to talk about what Fire Safety looks like in your home. Show your kids where the smoke alarms are, test them with your kids so they know what they sound like, and have a designated meeting spot outside your home where your kids know to meet at when they hear that alarm.

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of CLEVER and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.