When learning about fire safety, a poster-making session can help kids remember the common-sense tips that might save their lives in an emergency situation. Whether you are planning posters for a classroom or for a family activity, choose design ideas that will be easy to execute for the ages and skill level of the children.

As part of a lesson about fire, you can have students create posters that list different facts about fire. Ask students to take what they learned from a class discussion and to perform their own research, then have them present their facts on a poster. If students are stuck, you might remind them of well-known facts: fire spreads quickly, smoke is just as dangerous as flames, and inhaling the hot air created by fire can cause serious lung damage. This type of poster project is a way of reinforcing basic fire facts. Have students illustrate each fact or find unique ways to present their list so that people walking by the poster can see and remember the information easily. Turn the poster session into a competition and educational exercise by challenging the class to find facts that their classmates did not know.

To help children remember what to do if they find themselves in a building that is on fire, suggest a poster about fire safety tips. You might have them focus on the time-sensitive nature of fire, for example, which makes it imperative to get out of a burning building as quickly as possible. Students can include ideas such as staying low to the ground when walking in a burning building and never going back into a place that is on fire. You can also include fire prevention tips such as testing smoke detectors, placing space heaters away from fabrics and items that might catch on fire, and paying attention to food that is on the stove or in the oven. For a class project, you can assign students one tip each and have them create a scene that shows the right and the wrong way to handle a potentially dangerous situation.

For a family fire safety poster project, work on posters that explain how a family can plan for a fire emergency. You might have a child draw a map of the escape routes in the home, with all exits from each room labeled; kids can go so far as to label the primary and secondary exits or alternate routes. Family fire safety posters can list the meeting point for a family, show the "stop, drop, and roll" procedure, or show family members escaping safely from a room. Turn the poster-making session into a family discussion by talking about each safety route; you can also put the posters up around the home to reinforce the lesson.