money saving

Survival Skills

Are you attached to your child at the hip every minute of every single day? Your children have a far greater chance of survival if they possess some basic self-reliance skills and have practiced the emergency disaster plan with the family.

Even if your work does not force you to leave the property and the children are homeschooled, they are still not protected from a crisis. Children, even the youngest ones in the family, must learn what to do if mommy and daddy are not home, are injured, or are killed, during a disaster. Teaching children about disaster should begin at a very early age and the information should be presented in a manner which does not scare the child, but still relays the seriousness of the issue.

For example, children are firmly taught that a stove is hot and not to touch it when they are a toddler, yet they do not fear walking by the stove when they scamper into the kitchen. Employ non-nonsense and loving tactics when educating children about emergency situations and their role during such situations.

Children need to learn what to do in event that specific disasters strikes. A checklist or picture book can help relay this message and reinforce the lessons learned during drills. Winter weather threats can quickly prove deadly for panicked children who suddenly find themselves without an adult around to save the day. If little Billy ventures out in the cold to look for help because the power went out, then he could get frostbit in mere minutes if not dressed properly.

Survival Skills

Survival Skills to Teach Your Children

Some of the skills on this list may not be appropriate for young children, but here are 10 to consider:

1. Foraging during winter and what can be eaten around the house.
2. Starting a fire using multiple methods.
3. Cooking over an open fire.
4. How to use a “finger” saw to cut kindling.
5. How to safely use a knife.
6. Finding the way home, even in snow, from multiple directions.
7. Warding off frostbite.
8. How to dry damp or wet gloves, socks, and hats over a fire safely.
9. Checking if frozen ponds and creeks are safe to walk on.
10. Finding drinking water / melt snow to drink.
11. Finding shelter when it’s cold.

Winter Survival Kit Items For Young Children

• Picture book which details family emergency plan with family contact information typed inside the front cover. Pages specific to winter survival and other weather-related disaster tips should be included in the book.
• Mylar blanket, gloves, hat, scarf, thermal socks, set of thermal underwear and handwarmers
• Flashlight and glow sticks.
• Basic first-aid kit with Band Aids, a quick clot bandage, triple antibiotic ointment, and antiseptic wipes.
• Map created to guide the child to a designated meeting place if they must evacuate the home.
• Several bottles of water and food which can be opened easily and eaten without heating.

Winter Survival Kit Items For Older Children

• Copy of family emergency plan, family contact information
• Flashlight and glow lights
• Mylar blanket, gloves, hat, scarf, thermal socks, set of thermal underwear and handwarmers
• Firestarter and reminder note about safety and details about starting a fire in the family fireplace or woodstove. Instructions on how to utilize the family solar generator if one is owned by the family.
• Bottles of water and long-term storage food which can be heated in a pouch but also food items which do not require cooking.
• Pocket knife, signaling mirror, binoculars and a compass

What would you add to this list? Share your ideas in the section below:

Learn How To ‘Live Off The Land’ With Just Your Gun. Read More Here.

The post 11 Winter Survival Skills Every Child Should Know appeared first on Off The Grid News.

This article first appeared on offthegridnews.com See it here

Survival Shelter

Cold weather puts a strain on anyone’s survival skills. The greatest problem you face is maintaining your body heat, which the cold will do everything it can to steal. Although being in a shelter can help protect you from the cold, it doesn’t always help as much as you’d like.

One of the biggest problems with most survival shelters is that they leak air. We have this problem with our homes as well, but a home heating system usually has enough overcapacity to make up for it. Nevertheless, those air leaks cost us money, in the sense that they make us burn more energy than we would otherwise.

If you have an energy audit done on your home, they will check for air leaks as well as places which aren’t properly insulated. Many people lose a lot of heat through their attic, because the insulation compresses over time, leaving them without enough insulation to meet their home’s needs. They also find that seals around doors and windows wear, allowing air leaks that steal precious heat.

Similarly, if you are in a winter survival situation, you need to run a home energy audit of your survival shelter. Your shelter probably won’t have much insulation and it will also have air leaks. Identify those so that you can do something about them.

Keeping a Log Cabin Warm

In the days of log cabins, they would do this in the fall, before the weather became really cold. Most log cabins were chinked with mud, which would eventually fall out of the cracks between the logs. They would mix up some more mud, using clay instead of dirt if they could, and fill the space between the logs, “chinking them.”

Another common area that was a problem was the area between the bottom log and the ground. The bottom log never fit perfectly with the ground, leaving a gap where wind could come through. They would take care of this gap by “banking” their cabin.

Banking is nothing more than piling up dirt around the edges of the cabin to fill this space between the bottom log and the ground. Typically, they would bank it up about half the height of that bottom log, just to make sure that it wouldn’t pack down or wash away. Some log cabins actually had enough dirt banked around them through the years that it made the cabin look as if it had been built partially underground.

The same idea will work with almost any survival shelter. It doesn’t matter if you’ve made a log cabin, a yurt or a dirt bag building, you’ll find the same sort of problem around the base. By taking the time to “bank” the bottom of the walls, you eliminate one possible path for cold air to come into your survival shelter.

Using Snow For Banking

Survival Shelter

There’s still more that you can do, though. Once it snows, you can bank the walls again with snow. In fact, I’d recommend banking the walls with snow every chance you get, until the snow is piled up against your walls up to the eaves of your shelter. By doing this, you create somewhat of a snow cave or igloo.

Let me explain what I’m after here. Obviously, if you have enough snow to bank it up to the eaves, you’re living in a very cold area. So cold, that you probably have temperatures which dip well below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The interesting thing about that: The snow piled up against your house won’t get much colder than 32 degrees. In a very cold winter, that’s actually quite warm.

Without the snow, you might have temperatures below zero on the outside of your shelter’s walls. That greatly reduces the chance of ever having temperatures of 70 degrees on the inside of your shelter. The greater temperature differential will make it harder to heat your survival shelter.

Wait, There’s More

With your walls covered in snow, the inside of your survival shelter should be considerably warmer, even if it never does hit 70 degrees. So, why isn’t it reaching 70 degrees? Perhaps because you don’t have any insulation.

The insulation we’re referencing here consists of many pockets of air, separated by some material. The key, though, is those pockets of air. The more pockets there are or the more layers of pockets there are, the better the insulation can separate the heat from the cold.

Your survival shelter probably doesn’t have many layers of air pockets and may only have one. With only one layer, it’s hard to keep heat in. It’s better than zero, but not good enough. You need to add more layers between the walls of your shelter and the outside air. You especially need to do this on your roof.

The easiest way to add lots of air pockets between the roof of your shelter and the outside air is with pine boughs and a tarp. Cut the ends of pine branches off and pile them on your roof. This may require reinforcing your roof, but it’ll be worth it. Once you have a good layer of pine branches, stretch the tarp over them and tie it tightly in place. Trapped between the roof of your shelter and the tarp, the pine branches will begin to act like insulation, helping to keep the heat inside of your survival shelter.

With a little hard work, your survival shelter can be warmer than ever – so warm, you won’t want to leave.

Do you have advice on making a survival shelter warmer? Share it in the section below:

Get $600 Worth Of Survival Blueprints … Absolutely Free!

The post How To Insulate Your Survival Shelter With Snow appeared first on Off The Grid News.

This article first appeared on offthegridnews.com See it here