This activity is great for scouts that have never built their own fire before. Use food snacks to represent each part of a real fire. Then eat it! After you build and eat these fake edible fires, then you are ready for a real fire.
Teach fire safety through each of these fire building steps. When you have finished, eat your fire!
How to Build your Edible Fire:
You need:
- mini marshmallows and/or cheerios
- large pretzel log (1 per scout)
- regular pretzel sticks
- potato sticks
- red hots (or hot tamales or other candy)
- candy corn
- cups (to hold all the items)
- plates (their mess-kit plate will work very well).
Steps:
- Create a fire ring with rocks (mini marshmallows and Cheerios!). A fire ring is important to contain your fire so it doesn’t spread out of control.
- You need fuel for your fire, which is usually large logs. Break your pretzel log into 3 pieces and use them to make a “V” or “A” shape. This is the fuel for your fire.
- Next add small sticks for fire kindling (use the small pretzels). Kindling will burn easily and is good to help your fire get going. Put these into the corner of the “V” or lean them up against the cross bar of the “A.”
- Underneath the kindling, add the tinder (smallest, easiest to burn or catch fire).
- Light the tinder until you have flames (add the candy corn).
- Continue to add more kindling.
- When the fire has burned a while, you will have hot coals (add the red-hots).
- Now you have built a fire!
Now Build a (tiny) Real Fire!
Every girl should learn how to build a fire all on her own. We start with the edible fires. Then I let each girl build their very own tiny fire with sticks and tinder about the same size as what these snack foods make. I give every girl a chance to light their real fire all by themselves while being supervised closely. Then they must demonstrate that they know how to put it out. Their “first fire” is very small, so it’s easy to do, and helps them build confidence while building their skills. All of these tiny fires are made inside the fire ring area of the campground for safety.
I cannot stress enough how important it is for each girl to be able to do this on her own with a trusted adult supervising the entire time. Even lighting a match or a barbecue lighter can be a real challenge if it’s your first time. Resist the urge to “help” them too much, because often adults end up doing it for them. You want them to gain the confidence of “I did it myself!”
Now you are ready to assign some girls to build the big camp fire for cooking! Bring on the camp food!
See my Easy Camp Food Ideas for Kids article to get you started!
Enjoy!
