"We heard glass crack. My uncle looked outside and saw flames," said Timmane Hooper, a sixth-grade student at School #2 in Rochester.

His uncle shepherded everyone outside their apartment, but Timmane was still afraid.

"There was a truck near the fire," he said. "We were afraid it would blow up."

More fears crept in as the flames spread.

"I didn't want us to be homeless," he said.

But they were. Timmane was housed initially in a hotel with his family.

His elementary teacher, Dale Spafford, came and got him and brought him to school.

It wasn't until he remembered a packet he'd put on a pile on the corner of his desk a few months earlier that Spafford, a member of the Rochester Teachers Association, knew what to do with this shaken student.

The new Prevention 1st Foundation, Inc. program called "After the Fire: The Teachable Moment" took him through the steps of helping Timmane through his trauma and getting all of the students to explore fire safety.

"I had to quickly adapt to everything," Spafford said. "I took a tragic situation and made a teachable moment. Thank God for that packet."

Prevention 1st guided Spafford in choosing appropriate literature, how to deal with emotions and questions of students and the fire victim, and how to expand on fire safety lessons. School social workers and other health care professionals can also be used to provide support.

Initially, Spafford had Timmane talk about what happened, and it helped ease the anxiety everyone in the class felt too. Spafford started his students off reading A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams, about a family who lost everything in a fire.

Homework assignments that week all centered on fire safety plans at home.

"Everyone turned it in," said Spafford. "Everyone had a dialogue with their families."

The Prevention 1st program teaches families to have a fire safety plan, including establishing a meeting place in emergencies.

Students were taught to check smoke alarms. An animated game at www.homefiredrill.org shows families what to do when the smoke alarm sounds: check doors for heat; stay put if there's smoke in the hallway; crawl low under smoke.

Students collected money to buy Timmane school clothes; they also brought in some sheets and curtains.

He's sad he lost his kindergarten graduation certificate and other school projects in the flames and water.

"It was memories of me I wanted to keep forever," Timmane said. "But I got through it. I got the best teacher ever and the best class ever."