Spring is a great time to teach your students road safety; whether they are pedestrians, cyclists or drivers.
It’s a classic scene across Canadian neighbourhoods: when the weather warms up, kids get revved up and come out to play en masse. While the birds are chirping and the tulips surging, kids pepper sidewalks and streets on foot. Or, they race by on blades, bikes and boards.
It all makes for the perfect time for teachers to help kids brush up on road safety skills or teach new ones to make all that horse-play as safe as possible.
In kid-packed Orleans, Ontario, just outside of Ottawa, Lissa Côté-Deschênes is busy planning a bike rodeo for her K-6 elementary school. And she’s doing it with the help of the Ophea’s recently released Road Safety Resource.
“Two colleagues and I decided to do it because it totally ties into our curriculum,” Côté says. “Plus, it’s important because we want our youth to be active so I am trying to teach them skills that they can use outside of schools. Organized sports are great, but not all families can do that. So, if I can just teach children to bike safely in their community, they’ll be healthy that way.”
Côté’s June rodeo is jam packed with stations for learning and safety. A local public health nurse will bring “brain jell-o” to demonstrate the importance of wearing a helmet, while another station will help the students decorate their bikes.
“We are taking exactly what Ophea has suggested and doing one for the first time ever and the planning is going well. We had no idea where to start so we followed step by step exactly what’s in the resource. Honestly, I wouldn’t have done it without the resource,” Côté says.
The resource, developed in partnership between The Ministry of Transportation and Ophea, is a comprehensive safety education classroom toolkit for students in K – 12. The lessons and community and school-wide activities emphasize students’ decision-making and thinking skills and is designed to teach them to take personal responsibility for their own safety.
Developed in 2009, the road safety program is divided into four division levels, K-3, 4- 6, 7-8 and 9-12, the kit has dynamic lesson plans and comprehensive support material. The resource is the result of collaboration and consultation with representatives from MTO, public health, police, as well as teachers and advisors from associations and community organizations, with MTO identifying the need and spearheading the process.
The resource begins with information to build awareness around pedestrian safety at the primary grades along with some peer education opportunities with students from older grades, with a goal to building a solid foundation of road safety skills. Pedestrian safety, traffic sign awareness, crossing the road, walking safely in school bus zones and beginner’s bicycle safety and protective equipment are all addressed in the lesson plans and support material.
Ophea projects leader Tammy Shubat says the resource is the first of its kind in Ontario and marks a paradigm shift for safety education.
“It’s unique because it ensures consistent road safety messages for students across the province and it’s the first with connections to a variety of the province’s curricula,” she says. “It also offers both cross-curricular lesson plans as well as a broad range of additional community and school-wide activities, like the bike rodeo, that can be lead by students-themselves, or parents, and community partners.”
Shubat also says educators appreciate that the resource reflects the Healthy Schools framework. She says teachers can easily incorporate and align it with other activities or initiatives already going on at the school level. Plus, the lessons are cross curricular and align with curriculum expectations in Health and Physical Education, the Languages, and in some cases Media Studies or Social Studies.
For Lissa Côté-Deschênes, the resource is “grab and go” and meets her teaching and curriculum needs.
“What’s great about this resource is that I don’t need to do a whole unit, I can just use one lesson because they don’t necessarily follow each other. The kids love these because it is visual and the lesson plans are very hands on. When you are teaching health, sometimes it’s too easy to teach in class. It doesn’t have to be that way. A lot of the Road Safety Resource lesson plans are active. You don’t need to do it in a classroom, you can keep the kids in the gym and keep them active while they are learning health.
“A student will remember a lot more if they are having fun doing than if they are just sitting in class. It is important to have some theory, but when they are really working on it and being active, I think they’ll remember it more.”
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