Fire Safety Puzzles

Fire safety puzzles are excellent tools for helping children understand the basics of fire prevention and safety.

According to the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA), more than 100,000 fires are set by children each year. Approximately 25 percent of all fire-related fatalities are children, and many of the fires that kill youngsters are the result of kids playing with fire. The best way to prevent such tragic consequences is to teach children respect for fire, how to prevent fire, and the basic principles of fire safety.

Talking to children about fire safety is a very important part of teaching them about the dangers of fire and helping them understand the how-to’s of fire safety. However, talking alone isn’t sufficient to really drive home the importance of fire safety to young children. It’s important for children to have an opportunity to engage all of their senses in the learning process. Children learn by doing, as well as by listening.

When teaching your children about fire safety, it is a good idea to extend fire safety lessons beyond your conversations and into their play time. When children are able to see, touch and process details about new concepts, much deeper learning occurs. Educational games can be very enriching, because they help bring new ideas to life for kids. Puzzles are particularly powerful tools for reinforcing life-saving fire safety concepts for children.

• Teachers and parents can download many different fire safety activities, lessons and puzzles from the Ask A Cop Fire Safety Week online resource center.

• The New York Department of State publishes a comprehensive ‘’Kids’ Room" fire safety site, which includes several puzzles to help educate children of all ages about fire safety and prevention. Choices include word find, crossword, word decoder and other types of puzzles. Kids will also enjoy the photos and information about Hershey, the official arson dog for the state’s Office of Fire Prevention and Control (OFPC). For additional educational activities, download the organization’s complete free fire safety activity book.

• The Alaska Fire Marshall’s Office provides a complete Web page of educational activities and puzzles designed to help kids understand the dangers of fire and how to stay safe in situations involving fire.

• The USFA Kids Web site features a variety of puzzles, coloring pages and other activities that can help kids grasp the importance of fire safety. The site also provides practical information, in terms that kids can understand, regarding home fire safety, smoke detectors and how to escape from fire. Kids can even earn their Junior Fire Marshall certificates, which they can download and print after successfully completing a fire safety quiz. Parents and teachers can download additional puzzles in both English and Spanish, along with many other educational suggestions and activities.

• State Farm Insurance’s Smoke Detectives site, developed in conjunction with the International Association of Fire Fighters and the International Association of Fire Chiefs, provides interactive Flash games and puzzles that convey important fire prevention and safety tips to youngsters.

• StayingAlive.com is a free child safety resource for parents, teachers and youngsters. The site provides free fire safety crossword puzzles and other educational activities designed to help kids learn to avoid fire-related injuries and accidents. Site characters "Flip the Fire Monkey" and "Mrs. Aboutfire" help make learning about fire safety fun for young children.

• The Hall of Flame Museum of Firefighting in Phoenix, Arizona, features hands-on fire safety exhibits and activities of interest to children and adults alike. The facility’s play area features a fire pole that kids can climb, a fire safety doll and fire safety puzzles designed to reinforce important safety concepts.

• Visit the Word Search Fun Web site for a free fire safety search-a-word puzzle. These types of puzzles are great for parents and children to work on together.

• The DLTK Crafts for Kids site provides fire-themed jigsaw puzzles for kids.

Individual fire departments around the country are doing their part to make it easy to find materials to teach kids about fire safety by publishing age-appropriate puzzles and other educational resources on their Web sites.

A few of the available fire department resources include:

• The City of Lake Wales (Florida) Fire Department provides kids with many different kids of educational puzzles, presented by fun and endearing department mascot "Big Dog."

• The Glynn County (Georgia) Fire Department offers a selection of online fire safety jigsaw puzzles, in varying degrees of difficulty (easy, average, difficult).

• The Pend Oreille County Volunteer Fire Department in Newport, Washington, (Fire District No. 3) provides several large print puzzles about fire safety that are ideal activities for grandparents to undertake with their grandchildren.

• The Riverside County (California) Fire Department offers a crossword puzzle that teaches fire safety concepts.

When you begin introducing fire safety concepts to your children, it is a good idea to provide them with puzzles, coloring pages and other age-appropriate activities that tie directly to the topics your are discussing. You might want to introduce a concept, reward the child for attentiveness by giving him or her puzzle to solve during playtime, and then follow up with a discussion of the lessons learned from the puzzle.

With so many free online resources for different types of puzzles about fire safety, it shouldn’t be difficult to locate a significant quantity and variety of fun and educational activities to keep the youngsters in your home engaged and interested in fire safety for quite a while.

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