Ready Kids › Home Alone Ready › Badge 5 › Lesson 5.4
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Your plan, written down
Draw a floor plan with two ways out of every room, alarms marked, a meeting place, and run it once.
1Look
A plan on the fridge
A plan on the fridge
A hand-drawn floor plan on lined paper, arrows out of every room, small circles for the alarms, and a star on a lamppost across the road.
This took a family twenty minutes on a Sunday. It is the most useful thing on that fridge.
2The idea
A plan is a piece of paper
An intention is we’d get out. A plan is a drawing: every room, every exit, two ways out of each room, alarms marked. Drawn, printed, on the fridge. If it is not written down, it is not a plan. It is a hope.
Two ways out: the door, and the other thing. The second door, the window, the way through the kitchen. In a fire the first way is blocked for exactly one person, and that is the person who needs the second way already worked out.
3The idea
The meeting place, and who needs help
A fixed spot outside, away from the house, that everybody knows. The lamppost. The neighbour’s gate. The postbox. Not outside. A specific thing you could point at. Everybody goes there and nobody goes anywhere else, so you know who is out.
Who needs help getting there: the toddler, Grandma, the dog. It is written on the plan, with who does it. If you are home with a younger one, that is you, on your way out, never a trip back in. Call from outside. Never from inside the house.
4The idea
The Nguyen plan
Front door. Kitchen to the back door. Upstairs: the front bedroom has the flat porch roof under it, the back bedroom shouts from the window. An alarm on each floor. Meeting place: the big tree by the postbox. On the Sunday they walk it, and Dad times it. Forty seconds.
Six weeks later the alarm goes off for a pan. Everybody is at the tree in under a minute. The nine-year-old makes the call from there. Nobody had to think, because the thinking was done on the Sunday.
5Build it
The escape plan builder
Your plan
Draw your rooms as boxes, add doors and windows, mark two ways out of each room, drop the alarms, and drop a star on the meeting place. It prints for the fridge.
Do it with a parent, at the table, tonight or Sunday. The printout is the point.
6Decide
Where is the meeting place?
Pick one to carry on.
7Say it
The plan in seven words
Say it with your own meeting place in it
“Out, to the tree, call from there.”
Everybody in the house should be able to say it. Including the youngest.
8Find them
Which of these belong on the plan?
Tap the ones that count.
Find all 4.
9Do it
Before you leave this page
Run the plan with your whole family, once, this week. Somebody presses the alarm test button. Everybody goes to the meeting place. Time it.
Tick it when you have done it.
Lesson done.
Two ways out of every room. A meeting place you could point at. Call from outside, never from in the house.
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