Bucket Brigade
Grade Levels : K-2

Lesson Objective
Primary Subjects/Skills
Suggested Procedure

Lesson Objective:
Students learn about and critique an earlier firefighting method

Primary Subjects/Skills:
History, Science, English Language Arts (vocabulary and discussion/debate), Critical Thinking

Suggested Procedure:
As part of a discussion of people’s life styles in America over 200 years ago, talk about the ways people fought fires.

Remind students that the early settlers had no fire departments, fire trucks, fire hydrants, or hoses. Ask where they would get the water? It had to be carried in leather or wooden buckets (there were no aluminum pails) from wells, streams or rivers. Everybody in the town came out to help. And they soon learned a better way to help.

Discuss the problem with a single person filling a bucket and running back to throw the water on a fire, then running back to well or stream.
1. The water would spill out.
2. he people would tire quickly.
3. They could not get water to the fire very fast.

What did they do to get water to the fire faster? They worked together as a team. They formed a bucket brigade.

Tell students they are going to form a bucket brigade and see for themselves that it is a faster way to fight a fire.

Put together a ten-person bucket brigade (or you can put together more than one brigade) during a recess or outdoor activity period. Assemble the materials and tell students what they represent:
• a box of paper scraps or packing peanuts (water in a water source)
• an empty box (the “fire” to be extinguished)
• ten large paper cups (as buckets)

Ask students who are not in the brigade to time them. Try it two different ways. Formation A is a single line that passes a bucket back and forth. Formation B is two lines. One line of stronger people pass the full buckets to the fire. A second line of people who are not as strong pass the empty buckets back to the well or stream. When they have finished, ask the timekeepers to tell which was faster in getting more water to the fire. Ask students to discuss which procedure was a better firefighting method and why.

Formation A:
This is a one-line bucket brigade. Have the students form a line, holding hands. Place the water source (full) container and a stack of ten paper cups at one end of the line and the fire (empty) container at the other. On your signal, the child closest to the “water source” should begin filling up buckets with “water” and passing them to the next child in line, who will continue to pass the full buckets along the line until they reach the child closest to the “fire.” The child closest to the fire will dump the water into the container representing the fire, then will pass the empty bucket back along the line to be refilled and re-passed by the child at the other end of the line. This process will continue until the water source is “dry.”

Discuss the problems with a bucket brigade.
1. You need a large group of people.
2. You need at least several buckets.
3. It is a slow method that does not provide a heavy, steady flow of water.
4. A gallon of water weighs 8 pounds. The bucket adds more weight. A full bucket could be too heavy for some people to lift and pass.

To help solve the problem of the weight of water, try the procedure a different way.

Formation B:
Assemble the students in two lines. Tell them that Line 1 is made up of stronger people who can pass buckets containing water to the fire. Line 2 is made up of less strong people who will pass empty buckets back to the water source. The person at the water source will take empty buckets from the last person in Line 2 and the person at the fire will pass empty buckets to the nearest person in Line 2. You can reverse the roles of the lines, so each child gets to play a strong person.

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