Thursday, September 22, 2011

A Trip to the Fire Staion!

Today I went on a field trip to the fire station with Emmy's Kindergarten class. We had lots of fun. I got to meet all the kids in the class and figure out who these kids are that Emmy is always talking about.

Here's Emmy sitting by me on the school bus.


When we got to the fire station we met three Firefighters. Fireman Rodney, Fireman Noe, and Fireman Dan.

Here's Fireman Rodney telling the kids all about the two brush fire trucks


and some of the equipment they use. This things floats in any kind of body of water they can find and sucks it into the hoses in case their tanks run out.


Emmy has many good friends. Here she is with Yvette.


Here's Fireman Dan showing the inside of a brush fire truck.


Then we went out and saw the big fire truck.


They showed us some of the cool things on there, too.


The kids all got a chance to go in the fire truck to look around,


but then the alarm went off. There had been an accident in town and they had to go, so we waited for about 20 minutes.


The kids played games and sang some songs. As they were marching in the parking lot singing "The Ants Go Marching One by One" the firemen came back. Yay!


Now it was time to go with Fireman Noe to see the inside of the station. We saw the kitchen and lounge area.


There was also a livingroom area, several bedrooms and bathrooms, and a workout room. Noe answered any questions we had. Somebody asked if they had a dalmatian, but he said no. I asked what Dalmatians would do and he said "nothing." I thought that was funny. We saw maps on the wall that they can look at to see where they need to go, but Noe also said that the trucks have GPS. That's nice.

After we toured the inside we met back up with the other class that had gone with us in the garage where Fireman Rodney showed all the equipment he had to wear. Noe told us earlier that all the gear weighs about 75 pounds. Here's Fireman Rodney getting started


and all dressed: pants, jacket, hood, mask, helmet, and airtank.


Here he's showing how he breathes with the tank.


He wanted all the kids to hear what it sounded like when he breathed so that if they were ever in a fire and heard that sound they would know that it was a "good guy." They all gave him a hug. Emmy was one of the last ones because she's so shy and had to work up to it.


Time to get back on the bus to go back to school in time for lunch. You can see Emmy's teacher, Mrs. Brown, on the right with the blonde hair.


I stayed for lunch with Emmy. Here she is being weird.


It was a very fun trip. I'll probably go with them when they go to the pumpkin patch next month.

After lunch I went back to Emmy's class with her for the rest of the day. I read a couple books, helped kids write their numbers, and threw away trash from the cut and paste time. It was a lot of fun. Andrew wants me to come visit his class one of these days. I told him I would talk to his teacher about it.

5 comments:

EmmaP said...

When my friend trained at the fire academy he said that not only did they practice their drills with all of their gear, but often times they had to carry around a dummy approximately 200 lbs to get used to carrying unconscious bodies.

EmmaP said...

Oh - and once I was curious about the dalmation/fireman thing too. I looked it up and in ye olde days, dalmations were known to help keep horses "calm". So, often times as horses were being trained, owners would have dalmations present. When women started driving their own horse and buggies, the wealthy ladies used to have dalmations run along side the buggies. This would help the horses stay calm against other traffic or other dogs that might run into the street. So, Dalmations were known as "coaches" or "coachmen" (Ever wondered why Coachman RV uses a Dalmation as their mascot?) Well, also way back when dalmations used to accompany traveling coaches too. The stagecoach driver could spend the night in a hotel and the dalmations would sleep out next to the horses to keep away thieves from stealing them. Since Dalmations were known to calm horses, firemen (back then there were no trucks - it was all horse and buggy) used the dalmations to keep the horses calm while they spent hours putting out the fires.

Ruthykins said...

oh, okay. the coachmen logo makes sense now

okeydokeyifine said...

Did it bring back memories of the Middlebury Firehouse? Say, CHEESE.

Maura said...

super fun! Juliet had Mrs. Brown. :)