River's French homework: a fire escape plan
River's French class is learning about fire safety this week. A paper came home on Friday with a family project on it: look at the pictures together, then go over what our family would do in a fire or an emergency. It was due this morning.
What the paper asked
The pictures were six little prompts for a kid to finish.
- If I see or smell smoke, I should...
- When I am safe outside, I should...
- When I see a hot stove, I should...
- A good meeting place for my family is...
- When there is a fire drill at school, I should...
- If my clothes catch on fire, I should...
For parents, it said to show your child which door to go out of, where the smoke detectors are, where to meet outside, which neighbor to go to for help and who to call.
Our plan
We put ours on one page, in French: a floor plan of the house with the ways out marked on it.
Red arrows are the route inside the house. Green arrows are the ways out, by a door, a window or the garage. Down the side are four steps.
- Si tu vois du feu ou de la fumée, sors tout de suite ! If you see fire or smoke, get out right away.
- Reste au ras du sol sous la fumée. Stay low to the floor, under the smoke.
- Suis les flèches vertes pour sortir. Follow the green arrows to get out.
- Retrouve-toi à notre point de rassemblement. Meet at our meeting place.
Our meeting place is the black mailbox in the front yard. The line across the top is the whole plan in three short sentences: Sortez. Restez dehors. Retrouvez-vous ! Get out. Stay out. Meet up.
The animated one
The kid on the poster was nobody in particular. I wanted it to be River, so I asked Claude to turn the page into a short cartoon with him in it.
It runs about a minute and then starts over. River is asleep. A fire starts at the stove and the smoke detector goes off. He gets down low, crawls along the hall under the smoke, goes out through the garage and follows the dotted line to the mailbox, where Mom, Dad and Justice are waiting. Then we call 911 and the fire truck shows up.
After that it plays a Plan B. If smoke is blocking the hall, he goes out his bedroom window and walks around the house to the same mailbox. Two ways out of every room is the part of a fire plan that is easy to skip.
The buttons are in French too. The numbers jump to each step, and Voix reads the French out loud on phones and computers that have a French voice. The small grey line under each sentence is the English.
The French words
The paper came with five words to practice. All five turn up in the cartoon.
- Pompier: fireman
- Camion de pompiers: fire truck
- Feu: fire
- Alarme incendie: fire alarm
- Détecteur de fumée: smoke detector
How it was made
I gave Claude a photo of the homework paper and a picture of our plan, and asked for an animated version with River as the kid. It redrew the floor plan as a web drawing, wall by wall, and wrote a small script that moves him through it. River looks the way he does in River's Rocket Works: blond hair, orange shirt, navy shorts. It is one web page with no video file, so it loads fast and works on a phone.
The parts that go past our poster, calling 911, never going back inside and the window route, came from the homework paper and from standard fire safety advice. If you make one of these for your own house, check it against your real doors and windows, and then walk it with your kid. A cartoon is a way into that conversation. It doesn't replace it.
Try it
Claude built the animation and drafted this post from the homework paper and our plan.