This is a fun and easy project to do with your kids. It’s also a useful survival skill. A pill bottle firestarter is a versatile tool that works great in a survival situation when other firestarting methods aren’t available.
Teach Your Kids to Make a Pill Bottle Firestarter
Fire is very important in survival situations. It gives warmth, provides light, helps you cook food and gives a reassuring feeling that you can survive any end-of-the-world scenario as well as a simple camp-out on the weekend.
At home it is easy to start a fire, what with the firestarting devices that we always seem to take for granted, like a box of matches, a lighter, or the electronic igniter in the stove or oven.
Out in the wilderness, however, matches and lighters could fail and firestarting becomes a necessary skill. The weather can be both a friend and a foe, making the act of lighting a fire an easy task when conditions are dry or very difficult when it is windy or stormy. A box of waterproof matches would come in handy in this situation.
Children have to learn how to start a fire and there are actually many ways to do so. There is the hand drill, the fire plough, and fire drill that requires two people to start. However, these methods depend greatly on dry wood and grass. During wet weather or damp conditions, it is best to use a waterproof firestarter.
Click here to learn how to make a pill bottle firestarter, a fire starting device that can work in all sorts of weather conditions.
Get Your Kids Involved: How to Create a Pill Bottle Firestarter
One of the best things that you can do for your kids is to teach them to be more self-reliant and knowledgeable about their own survival at an early age. Make it a part of everything that you do and it won’t seem like such a weird concept. Each week, we tackle one skill, one activity, one refresher to do during our home school time (hey, might as well take advantage of the credits, huh?) that helps us learn more. In doing that, I am very Pro-Kid-Led activity, so I tasked my kids to come up with a way to use some old leftover pill bottles we had and create something for our bug out bags. They each did a little research and this is what they decided to share.(If I was a really good homeschooling mom, I would’ve had them write this article. Homeschool Mom Fail.)How to Make an Emergency Pill Bottle Firestarter1. Remove the labels from the pill bottles. You never want to confuse an empty, labeled pill bottle with another. In an emergency, you might not pay attention to which bottle you are grabbing. Be safe, do this step. We soaked our bottles in a little soapy water for a few hours, used a scrubby pad to take off as much of the paper & adhesive as possible, then used a little goo-fighting liquid to remove the last of the adhesive.2. Collect your ingredients. We used 100% cotton balls, a sandwich bag, empty bottles, petroleum jelly and chopsticks ( we use some hinged chopsticks for kids). If you have chopsticks, use them. You’ll be glad you did. Oh..and not included in the photo, a spoon!3. Tear the cotton balls up into small pieces. This is a good time to teach your kids about tensile strength in cotton balls. We prefer smaller pieces to allow us to maneuver into our rocket stove and use for small fires, but using the cotton balls full size is just fine.
When your kids learn how to start a fire or at least make a firestarter, you can consider it an achievement.
This is a basic survival skill that every child should learn so that when they are left on their own, they will be able to keep their bodies warm, prepare food, drive away wild animals and see in the dark, too.
Starting a fire is something that every prepper, old or young, should know how to do. Teaching these skills can be made exciting and fun by letting kids participate and get hands-on experience, and making a pill bottle firestarter is a great place to start.
Who knows, when that fateful day comes, your children may turn out to be the ones who will help you survive.
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