Fire Hose

      
When we were brainstorming about fire fighters one thing that was mentioned by most children was a hose.  They were needed to put out fires.  They sprayed water.  They were on the trucks.

So a hose was something we definitely needed for our fire truck.
          
I found the orange reel at a yard sale just down the street from my house for $2.  I couldn’t believe how lucky.  I then visited one of the local bike shops (one of our dad’s works there) and asked for old bike tubes.
                 
I cut off the valves and stapled the tubes together to make one long piece.  Covering the staples with black electric tape to prevent getting scratched while we played.
    
    Then I attached it to the reel with packing tape and we wound it in. 
       A hard piece of cardboard tubing was used for the nozzle.
    
The fire fighters worked hard breaking into the structure (yes it is our truck but also worked well as a burning building) with their axes then spraying in water.  A parent added blue streamers in the end of the nozzle.  I love that the grown ups are comfortable adding and inventing too.
                  
Just like a real fire station we leave our equipment all set for another day
                                          of fire fighting.

Fire Fighters

For the last several weeks we have been talking about fire fighters.
          
We spent about a week reading books and brainstorming what we know
                                 about fire fighters.
            
A parent that works at Costco saved us this great box.  Once we opened it
                  we started to plan how we would get in to it.
               
       
      The children drew the windows and doors and I cut them out.
        
Added two chairs, steering wheel and radio and it was ready to go.
          
This is an interesting question for us because in our valley we have three fire departments and they all have different coloured trucks.  We are planning trips to a couple of those fire halls so we will ask the fire fighters why their trucks are different colours.

In the meantime we had a visitor to our school.
    
The fire house came to school for the grade 3 classes to learn about getting
                        out of a burning house safely.
                  
Retired Deputy Fire Chief was volunteering and we asked him to visit our room to take a look at our fire truck.  We asked, 'why the trucks are different colours?"  He explained that a few decades ago it was believed that black and white was easier to see in traffic and that is why some fire trucks were changed.  But most trucks are still red.  We will have to survey the children to see what the majority want to paint the truck.