Ready Kids › Home Alone Ready › Badge 5 › Lesson 5.2
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Knowing early
Know your alarm's sound, test it, and treat smell, smoke and a hot door as enough to leave.
1Watch
The sound
The sound
A kid on the sofa with headphones on. The smoke alarm goes off in the hall. She pulls the headphones down and freezes. The film ends on her face.
15 secondsCount how long she sits there. That is the time this lesson is about.
2The idea
Know what it sounds like
A smoke alarm is the loudest thing in your house on purpose. If the first time you hear it is a real fire, you will freeze, and spend ten seconds working out what the noise is. Ten seconds is a lot of smoke. Press the test button, with a parent, so your body already knows the sound.
When it goes off for real, you do not go and investigate. Out, then think. Burnt toast setting it off is annoying. It is also the only way to find out it works.
3The idea
Smell and feel count too
An alarm is one detector. You are another. A smoke smell where there should not be one. A plastic or electrical smell. A room that is warmer than it should be. Smoke, even a little, along a ceiling.
A door that is hot to the back of your hand is information: there is fire on the other side, and that door stays shut. You do not need to see a flame to know there is a fire. Smell, smoke, heat: any one of them is enough to go.
4Say it
The order
Say it in a normal voice, like a fact
“Out first. Then find out.”
It answers every is-this-something question, so you never have to answer them one at a time.
5The idea
Ravi and the smell
Half past four. A smell like burning plastic from the hallway. No alarm. Ravi does not go and look. Out the front door, across the road, and he calls 911 from the neighbour’s step: I think there’s a fire in my house, I’m outside.
It was a charger melting in the hall socket. The firefighters unplug it. Nobody says he overreacted. Calling for a smell that turns out to be nearly nothing is the right call. That is the deal.
6Decide
You are upstairs. The alarm goes off downstairs. You cannot smell anything.
Pick one to carry on.
7Try it
Is this something?
Four clips
Four short clips: a burnt-toast smell, a warm laptop, a hot bedroom door, a faint plastic smell from the hall. Tap Go or Stay. After each, the page says which, and why.
Two of the four are Go. Notice the plastic smell is one of them, even with no smoke and no alarm.
8Find them
Which of these count as knowing there is a fire?
Tap the ones that count.
Find all 4.
9Do it
Before you leave this page
With a parent, press the test button on the smoke alarm. Then time how fast you can get from where you usually sit to your front door.
Tick it when you have done it.
Lesson done.
Test the alarm so you know the sound. Smell, smoke, a hot door: get out first, find out after.
Next lesson: Getting out