TEXAS CITY — The Texas City Fire Department hosted a fire safety training event for homeschooled children at Fire Station 4 on Monday morning.

The department had already planned to visit area elementary schools during October for Fire Prevention Month, but Code Enforcement Officer Natalia Campana asked why homeschooled children were not included.

“All of October is fire safety, so they go to all the elementary schools, and they show the kids what firefighters look like in bunker gear and teach them a little bit of everything, so I asked, ‘What about the homeschooled kids?’ And they were like, ‘Well, we don’t do anything for the homeschool kids,’ and I was like, ‘Well, we should definitely do something for them,’” Campana said.

This was the first year the department held the training for homeschooled children. According to Campana, interest in the event quickly exceeded expectations.

“We thought it was going to be 15 to 30 kids max, and I literally had to shut down registration because we got up to 200 kids,” Campana said.

Reaching families was relatively simple. Campana said she promoted the event through Facebook, where the department had recently created a page.

“Pretty much Facebook was all I used. We just created our Facebook page also, and I created an event on there and it was a hit,” Campana said.

The children were divided into groups based on their ages or grade levels and rotated through different instructional stations.

“The kiddos were grouped into five different groups based on the age range, or the grade level the kids would be, so it was pre-K group, kinder group, first, second, third — each group had a different instructor, and they got to go to different firefighters and learn about different things at different stations,” volunteer Emily Lyssy said.

At the stations, children learned about fire safety and emergency preparedness through hands-on activities and demonstrations.

“They had different activities they would do, we would teach them about fire safety, staying low and getting out, we had a group for spraying the fire hose, we demonstrated the fire truck, and showed them Sparky, and what it’s like to get dressed up in turnout gear,” Assistant Fire Marshal Ian Chase said.

Interest in the event extended beyond Texas City, drawing families from surrounding communities.

“We got a lot of kids that weren’t from Texas City. We got a lot of people from Houston, La Marque, League City, Kemah, Alvin, Pasadena, pretty much all the surrounding cities. It’s very sad we had to cut off,” Campana said.

The department hopes to make the training an annual event and encourages other fire departments in the area to consider offering similar programs for homeschooled children.