Teaching Fire Safety: Free Resources to Spark Learning

This post is sponsored by the National Fire Protection Association and Sparky.org.

October is National Fire Prevention Month, and Fire Prevention Week starts on October 9th which is right around the corner. What lessons and activities do you have planned for this very important week?

If you’re a K-2 teacher, you probably won't have any trouble answering that question. You might even have your week completely mapped out, with fire safety activities scheduled every day.

But if you teach older kids, you might be thinking, “Fire safety? That’s not in my curriculum. Fire prevention is taught in the early grades. Where would I even get fire safety resources for my grade level?"

As a former 5th grade teacher, I understand where you’re coming from. Upper elementary teachers are expected to cover an incredible amount of academic content, and there's not much time left over for anything else.

However, teaching older kids about fire safety and prevention is important, too. Kids are fascinated with fire, and older kids are more likely to take risks, test the limits, and try things they know they probably shouldn't do. All kids need to be reminded of the dire consequences of playing with fire, and the fact that even a small fire can easily get out of control.

The problem is that older kids need different types of resources than their younger peers, and games and activities that are fun for Kindergarten students just don't appeal to older kids. It's definitely a challenge to find lessons and activities that will capture the interest of older kids. Fortunately, I know where you can find an awesome collection of resources that are sure to "spark" learning!

Free Sparky Fire Safety Resources 
Have you visited Sparky.org or SparkySchoolHouse.org? Sparky the Fire Dog® is the official mascot of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), and these two Sparky websites are part of their ongoing public education campaign. Sparky.org is the website for kids with fun games, activities, and interactive resources about fire safety. Sparky School House is the companion site for educators where you can find links dozens of free fire-prevention resources like videos, ebooks, apps, and lesson plans.

The NFPA was founded back in 1896, fifteen years after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and for 120 years this non-profit organization has been on a mission to eliminate fire-related deaths, injury, and damage to property. One of their public education campaigns is Fire Prevention Week, and this year's theme is “Don’t Wait – Check the Date! Replace Smoke Alarms Every 10 Years.” Right now is the perfect time to check out the wealth of resources on these two sites!

If you’re a K-2 teacher, you probably already know about Sparky.org and Sparky School House, and you've found them to be great resources for teaching fire safety. Your students have probably already played the games on Sparky.org, and maybe you’ve downloaded all of the free apps for kids onto your classroom mobile devices. If you're really on top of your game, you've downloaded the brand new Sparky's Firehouse app, too!

But if you're an upper elementary teacher like me, you might have done what I did when I first discovered the Sparky resources. 

I looked around for about 2 minutes, and then I left. No joke. 

To tell you the truth, I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of activities and resources that appeared to be on Sparky School House, and most of them seemed to be for little kids. Let’s be real. Fifth graders don’t want to listen to a person dressed up in a dog costume talking about fire safety, or a cartoon dog demonstrating how to stop, drop, and roll.

It's a shame that I didn’t spend more time on Sparky School House, because I would have discovered that this site DOES have fire safety resources for older kids! You just have to know where to find those resources and the lesson plans that accompany them.

Navigating Sparky School House
Now that I've explored the resources on Sparky School House, I want to teach you how to navigate so you can find everything, too. Click the image below and let me show you around!

After you land on the Sparky School House main page, start by clicking the red download button to access the brand new free 2016 Fire Prevention Week Teacher Guide where you'll find a lesson about the importance of smoke alarms. This guide also includes a take-home home letter for parents in both English and Spanish.

Use the links in the black navigation bar at the top to browse a huge collection of fire prevention videos, apps, ebooks, lesson plans, and resources. The Digital Backpack link is the quickest way to find the teacher lesson plans and printables that go with the resources for students. You can search for lesson plans by grade level or by the resource it accompanies. Each lesson is aligned with Common Core State Standards, too!

Be sure to check out the Learn Not to Burn resources, even if you teach older kids. They're designated as resources for Kindergarten and First Grade, but they have incredibly helpful information for upper elementary teachers, too. If your students lack basic fire safety and prevention knowledge, I recommend reading the Learn Not to Burn lesson plans to find relevant information and then adapt the lesson materials to your own grade level.

My Favorite Upper Elementary Resources
Don't make the mistake that I did of assuming that everything on the site is for little kids. You can adapt some of the lessons that were designed for younger students, and there are also several lessons that are perfect for upper elementary students just as they are. These three are my favorites!

1. Great Chicago Fire of 1871 (Video and Teacher Guide)
I loved this 7-minute, informative video! The subject of the video is an interview between Lauren Tarshis, author of I Survived the Great Chicago Fire, and Casey Grant from the National Fire Prevention Association. They discuss the causes and effects of this devastating fire, how the NFPA was founded, and why Fire Prevention Week always takes place in October. You can download a Common Core aligned lesson plan to go with the video that includes a printable vocabulary graphic organizer. Click the Music & Videos link to find the video, and look in the Lessons section for the related teacher resources.

2. Fire Fighting’s Weird History and Fascinating Future (Video and Lesson Plan)Your students will be delighted by some of the silly facts shared in this video, and they'll also be amazed to learn how much firefighting has changed in the last hundred years. Fire Fighting's Weird History and Fascinating Future uses a mix of cartoon-style drawings, photographs, and historical drawings to look at the past, present, and future of firefighting. You'll also find a Common Core aligned lesson plan to go with the video that includes a Know-Wonder-Learned graphic organizer. Click the Music & Videos link to find the video, and look in the Lessons section for the related teacher resources.  

3. Rescue Dogs, Firefighting Heroes, and Science Facts (Ebook and Curriculum Guide)

The third awesome resource I found for upper elementary is a 15-page ebook that includes four stories and a poem. It's available in several different formats, including a printable PDF, Amazon Kindle, Nook. I love the variety of texts in this resource and the way fire prevention information is integrated throughout the book. Each selection includes discussion questions and a writing prompt, too, which would make the book perfect for small guided reading groups. 

Jack the Superhero Alien Firefighter is a fictional story, The Black Pearl and Captain Ron is an informational text selection about a firefighter and his rescue dog, Three Ways Science Has Made the World a More Fire-Safe Place is an informational science article, and Learning from Tragedy is a historical fiction selection. The final text is a poem called Sparky the Fire Dog® Says “Stay Fire-Safe!”  To find this resource, click on the Read & Play link at the top of Sparky School House, and scroll all the way to the end of the page. You'll find all the links to the different book formats as well as a link to the Common Core aligned Curriculum Guide.

Fire Prevention Week Plans - Done!
Now that you know where to find awesome resources for teaching kids about Fire Prevention Week, your lesson plans for next week will be super easy to write! You can integrate fire safety into just about every subject area, and your lessons are sure to "spark" enthusiasm for learning about fire prevention!

But teaching kids about fire safety might actually have a far more important result. Who knows? You might even save a life!

Did you know that three out of five home fire deaths occurred in homes without a working smoke alarm? Sadly, when smoke alarms fail to operate, it's usually because batteries are missing, disconnected, or dead. Those grim statistics might be why the theme of Fire Prevention Week has been related to smoke alarm safety for the last three years.

Be sure to send home the parent letter that can be found in the 2016 Fire Prevention Week Guide, and follow up a few days later by asking your students what they learned about the condition of the smoke alarms in their homes. Don't forget to check the smoke alarms in your own home, too!

Ask One: An Easy Strategy to Instantly Elevate Your Group Work

Guest post by Jen from Beyond Traditional Math

I spent a ton of time avoiding group work in my early years of teaching. There were many reasons, but the main one was that I felt that students weren’t accountable. I’d be walking around and found them off task, disengaged, sitting back with their arms crossed, one or two would take over all of the talking…I felt that it was not a good use of my instructional time.

I began to work on those behaviors little by little by finding group work strategies. I knew the importance of student talk, so I was committed to the task. After trying different approaches, I developed a strategy that has become my most favorite by far.

I call the strategy “Ask One,” and you'll see why after you read how it works. It is by far and away the easiest and the most effective way I’ve found to elevate group work.

What you do is quite simple. You set up all your group work routines and get to know your students. You make sure that your classroom culture is one of kindness so that group work feels safe. Once you are seeing patterns like disengagement or struggle with specific students, rearrange your class into groups where you can place one of these students in each group. 

Then choose an activity that is engaging and difficult. I like Reasoning Puzzles because they really require students to dig in. This is what I like to say to the students before we begin: “I’m going to come around and ask your group to explain your thinking. The thing is, only one of you will be allowed to do the explaining, and I’m going to choose that person. The rest of you won’t be able to say a word to me. You won’t know who it is until I come to your group. If that person is having trouble explaining the work of the group, I’ll let you all continue to work and come back and check.”

Then, you watch your groups as they begin the activity. You’ll see who is struggling or who might be disengaged. When you ask that student to explain, they may not be able to fully explain everything. That’s when you start asking questions. Don’t let the other group mates jump in to explain! Tell them you’ll come back and that you expect the other group mates to help them understand the problem. 

As you leave, you’ll see behaviors where the group mates just try to tell them what to say. You’ll get around that by asking more questions to see if they understand conceptually. And you keep coming back…and you keep coming back…

I’ve done this dozens of times, and every single time the student that I’ve chosen is able to come to an understanding with the help of the group. The group mates that may have easily gotten an answer have to explain in many ways, and because of this they understand the concept a bit deeper themselves! If noticed that the student I questioned was getting anxious, I would  pull back and ask others to do the explaining. If that happened, it also would tell me that I definitely need to do some deep reteaching.

If you’d like to try out this strategy, you can download my free Reasoning Puzzles Sampler Set from my TpT store. Now you can see why “Ask One” is one of my favorite strategies for increasing engagement in math. It will instantly elevate your group work and make it more effective!

Jen is a math instructional coach and interventionist with 10 years of experience teaching elementary students. Her passion is teaching math with a focus on conceptual knowledge through rigorous problem solving. You can find more teaching tips and resources (and hear about how much she has learned from her mistakes) at her blog: Beyond Traditional Math. You can also connect with her on Pinterest, TpT, Twitter, and Facebook.

6 Reasons to Teach Poetry in the Fall

Free Poetry Webinar Replay!
Register here!

April is National Poetry Month, so it comes as no surprise that many teachers wait until then to teach poetry. But if you ask me, September or October is a much better time to introduce kids to poetry. I love teaching poetry, and starting poetry now makes so much more sense than waiting until the end of the year.

I'll share my reasons at the end of this post, but first I want to acknowledge that not everyone feels the way I do about poetry. If you don't share my enthusiasm, April might seem like the perfect time to teach poetry because you won't have to think about it all until spring! But hang in here with me because I have some ideas that might make poetry easier and way more fun for you to teach.

If you’re not comfortable teaching poetry, your feelings could stem from your early experiences with it in school. Having to memorize poetry terms and analyzing confusing poems can suck the joy out of any poetry unit!

But when poetry is introduced in a more authentic manner as way of expressing feelings and painting pictures with words, the experience is quite different. I taught poetry year after year to my 4th and 5th graders, and those kids never failed to get excited about poetry. Furthermore, I was frequently blown away by the simple yet powerful poems they composed with very little guidance from me. After just a little instruction, it was as if my students were discovering their inner poets and the words began to flow almost effortlessly!

Take a look at Keyera’s poem about friendship. Keyera struggled in almost every subject area, but she found her voice in poetry. This was an area where all kids could shine!

How to Teach Kids to Love Poetry (Even If You Don't)
If poetry makes you uncomfortable, you might feel lost about how to foster a love of poetry within your students. Fortunately, help is on the way! Last April I created a webinar called How to Teach Kids to Love Poetry (Even If You Don’t) to share how I teach a complete poetry unit, step by step. After the webinar was over, I loved hearing from teachers who had never felt comfortable with poetry but who said they couldn't wait to get started!

Fall is a great time to introduce kids to poetry, so I decided to schedule a free presentation of How to Teach Kids to Love Poetry (Even If You Don’t). The live presentation is over, but you can use that link to sign up for the replay.

6 Reasons to Teach Poetry in the Fall

Why do I think fall is the perfect time to start teaching poetry? I brainstormed the 6 reasons below in just a few minutes, and I’m sure there are many more.

1. Teaching poetry in the fall fosters an appreciation for precise and powerful language early in the school year.

Teaching kids about poetry begins with reading and sharing poems that are meaningful to them and noticing how poets use simple yet powerful language. When I introduce poetry in 4th and 5th grade, I start with free verse rather than rhyming poems because I want my students to notice how the poet paints a word picture using a variety of techniques. Sometimes it’s by using just the right word to create that image, and other times it’s through the use of poetic devices like similes, metaphors, and personification. These techniques are used by authors in short stories and novels, too, and after your students are able to find them in poetry, they'll start noticing them in prose as well. So why not teach your students about the beauty and power of the written and spoken word early in the year?  

2. Teaching kids to write poetry engages them in authentic writing experiences and begins to build their confidence as writers.

In order for kids to learn how to read and understand poetry written by others, they first need to write their own poetry. The sooner you teach kids how to write poetry, the more impact those experiences will have on their reading and writing skills later in the year. Kids love learning about “poetic license” and knowing that it’s okay to break the rules of grammar in order to craft a poem. I also love the fact that students like Keyera and Keenon (below) who typically struggle with writing assignments like creative stories and reports often shine when it comes to writing poetry. Free from worries about making grammatical errors, they can focus on capturing their feelings and painting word pictures on paper. Later, when they share their poems in class, their confidence soars as their classmates express genuine appreciation for what they’ve written.

3. Poetry is a great way to connect with your students and get to know them better.

When kids learn to write meaningful poetry “from the heart,” you’ll learn so much about them as young people and not just as your students. You’ll learn about their fears, anxieties, and passions, and you’ll learn to appreciate their uniqueness. You might have heard the saying that “Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Reading and writing poetry together is a great way to show that you do care. Why wait until April to develop stronger relationships with your students?

4. Avoid test prep pressure by introducing poetry early in the school year.

You know what I mean. Test prep mania starts somewhere between January and April, depending on your state testing calendar. But no matter when it starts, sooner or later you’ll feel the pressure to cram as much instruction into every day as possible. And that kind of pressure doesn’t leave much time to savor the enjoyment of poetry. If you wait until the week before testing to teach poetry, you’ll be tempted to skip the poetry writing (no time for that!), and you’ll find yourself doing the very things that turn kids off about poetry. Don’t get me wrong. I do think kids should learn about poetic devices like similes, metaphors, and personification, and I do think they should learn to analyze poetry and look for deeper meanings. However, I think those skills should be developed through meaningful experiences with reading, writing, and discussing poetry and not in response to a standardized test that's looming on the horizon.

5. Introduce poetry now, and you'll be able to integrate it into other subjects later.

Teaching poetry early in the year gives your students a new voice with which to express themselves all year long. They might want to write a poem about the courage of early pioneers who traveled west in covered wagons, or as a journal response to a literature circle book. When your students discover something amazing in science, they might be inspired to write a poem about what they learned. If you've already introduced poetry early in the year, your students will be able to write easily on topics that interest them. 

6. Fall is a beautiful season, and the beauty of nature will inspire your students!

If you live in a place where temperatures drop and trees blaze with color in the fall, you'll know what I mean about the sights, smells, and sounds of autumn providing inspiration for young writers. Take advantage of these seasonal changes by incorporating them into your poetry unit. Sometimes kids have trouble thinking of topics to write about, and taking your students outside to write may be just what they need. Poetry often includes sensory language, and sensory experiences abound during autumn!  

Have I convinced you that fall is the perfect time to introduce your students to poetry? Why wait until April when you can start sharing the joys of reading and writing poetry now?

If poetry is a part of your curriculum, I invite you to watch the replay of How to Teach Kids to Love Poetry (Even If You Don't). Who knows? You might just discover your own inner poet!

DonorsChoose: A Jackpot of Classroom Funding!

Free Webinar and Giveaway!

Date: September 25th, 7:30 pm EDT

Click here to register!

Do you know about DonorsChoose.org? It's an amazing organization that helps public school teachers in the U.S. get funding for their classroom projects. I received thousands of dollars from donors when I was teaching, and now I love telling others about this fantastic organization.

My friend, Francie Kugelman, has experienced amazing success on DonorsChoose, so I invited her to be my guest for a free live webinar. She quickly agreed because she loves to spread the word about DonorsChoose, too!

We're presenting DonorsChoose: A Jackpot of Classroom Funding on Sunday, September 25th, at 7:30 pm EST, and we hope you can join us.

If you're like most teachers, you spend far too much money on classroom supplies and resources, so you owe it to yourself to learn about DonorsChoose.

Francie is a true DonorsChoose expert because she reads and edits project proposals which means she knows exactly how to write them so they have the best chance of getting funded. She's been using DonorsChoose to obtain funding for her classroom, and when you look at her results, it's obvious that  her strategies work. Over the last 10 years Francie has had 185 projects funded with a total value of over $112,000! Francie knows every trick in the book when it comes to DonorsChoose, and she's going to reveal all her secrets in the webinar!

Five Ways to Fit Science In

Guest post by Tammy
from The Owl Teacher Blog

Every year when I sit down to plan out my class schedule around all my specials, it seems I just don't have a lot of time left to fit in science, and don't even get me started on social studies. My district requires so much time to be spent on language arts and math. It's understandable that these are important subject areas, but I always feel I'm short changing my students. By time I get done, I'm often left with 30 minutes (give or take) for science. That often leaves me wondering, just how am I going to give my students good quality instruction in science while meeting the required curriculum?

Most districts (though not all) have a required amount of minutes they would like to see teachers spend in certain subject areas. Since this is typically something we have no control over, I wanted to share with you some strategies that I have used over the years to help fit more science in when I'm limited with class time.