Tells your child what to do if she is inside when smoke or fire breaks out, or if she catches fire, by asking questions and giving possible answers. After the first time playing and hearing the answer, you child will have more of an idea of what the right answer is next time she is asked the question.
Next, she can have fun sticking smoke alarms in the room, while the child on the screen reminds her and you why they are important.
How to play :
After the game has loaded, click on the big red button in the middle of the screen to start playing, or click anywhere on the game screen with the mouse.
The child on the screen asks a question and demonstrates 2 alternative courses of actions.
The screen is divided into 4 areas. Click on the top right area or bottom right area to indicate which action is the correct action. The child on the screen will tell you if that is correct or not, and will always reiterate the correct action. Pressing any key makes the child on the screen tell you the correct answer. (Hint: The top right area always shows an incorrect action that children in a fire emergency might be tempted to do, and the bottom right area always shows the recommended course of action for kids.)
Next, the scene becomes bigger and your child is invited to put smoke alarms into the scene. Click the mouse to place a fire alarm, or hit a key on the keyboard. A smoke alarm sound will be heard, so that your child will learn what that sound is.
In all scenes, clicking on the bottom right arrow takes you to the next scene.
Ages :
from 9 months - 5 years
Download time :
Game size is 1.1 MB.
On a high-speed internet connection the download seems instantaneous. Download takes about 2 minutes on a 56K modem the first time you play this game. Every time after that the game will normally open immediately.
Play ideas :
When the child on the screen is asking a question, you can click the top right scene or bottom right scene to trigger an animation there of a possible course of action to take. Click the bottom one first and ask your child if it is the correct action to take, on order to vary the question format that your child is responding to. If your child doesn’t say the right answer, then make it fun by saying “But yes! That is exactly what we should do when...”, so that your child enjoys getting the answer wrong and is therefore more likely to retain the correction of what the right answer really was.
During the big scene where you can stick smoke alarms in the room, ask your child a question every now and then to reinforce what she has learnt, such as “What do we do if we hear that alarm?”
With a younger child, you can just have more fun by asking him to guess what the color or position of the next smoke alarm will be, or ask him what color the last one was, and congratulate him on his answer: “That’s nearly right! It was blue, which is a lovely bright color like the color red that you said!”
Playing this game may provoke a bit of discussion in an older preschooler. Encourage this, as it is an opportunity to increase communication and to develop thinking and analysing skills. For instance, if your child says “The teddy bear should have closed the window,” you can say “If there’s smoke or fire, it is so important to get outside quickly that you don’t have to close the window.” Or if your child says “Why is the teddy bear stepping on the drawer?”, you can say “To help him get out of the window so the fire can’t get him.”
Early childhood development benefits :
This game is designed to teach, in a very simple yet interactively fun way, what to do and what not to do in a fire emergency. Firefighters tell us that they have found children too late, who were instinctively hiding or huddling in bed in a fire emergency. This game tries to emphasize the opposite of that instinct, and to replace it with a new one: get outside immediately.
An open-ended creative play activity is then offered, in the form of sticking smoke alarms wherever you want in the room. This part of the game introduces children to the sound of a smoke alarm. It is also a deliberate reminder to caregivers to get their smoke alarms installed. If yours isn’t, hopefully your little one will now be reminding you.
You may have noticed that the little teddy bear in this game is very clever. She can go to doors and windows and open them. The game has been designed with these actions to imitate, because it is the recommendation of our local firefighters. They have found children too late in their bedrooms, and have found unconscious but alive adults at doorways where they were overcome by smoke on their way out. Thus, our local firefighters who give presentations to young children tell them to go to the door to get out if there’s a fire, even if the child may be too small to actually open the door.
You may be wondering why this game doesn’t actually show someone on fire in order to demonstrate what to do if you catch fire. This is because children are programmed by nature to learn by imitation. We don’t want to demonstrate a person catching fire because children might imitate that if we did.
Lovely books :
The following lovely books and products have similarities with this game. You may like to check them out.
This game can be played on all Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers with Flash Player 5 or higher.
Most computers come with the standard free Flash player so you probably already have it.
If you’re not sure, then click here. If it brings you to the baby games list, then you have Flash Player 5 or higher. If not, then you can download the Flash Player here.
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