Planning National Walk to School Day

The Your Move student team met today to plan Walk to School Day.It is the same day as the cross country carnival so we acknowledged that it will be busy and have tried to keep it as simple as possible while still promoting the benefits of active travel.

Crawford from the City of Belmont has agreed to provide fruit and yoghurt for a healthy breakfast for the students. The team used the term planner to help brainstorm which activities could suit Walk to School Day. There were a few options which seemed good:

In the end they decided to go with class collage. After reading through the activity documentation, it was decided that we'd run an artwork competition to make a collage to be displayed outside the Italian room.

The team would like to promote the event and art competition by visiting each class during week 4 and reading a book '10 Tiny Things' about children walking to school who discover little trinkets along the way. After the booking reading, they will ask the students to collect interesting leaves etc on their way to school on Walk to School Day. On the event day they'd like teachers to provide time for the students to make a small A5 artwork by tracing leaves (they have examples to show the classes) which can be turned into a collage for display outside the Italian Room. The best artworks will win prizes. We selected prizes from the your move rewards shop and they are on their way.

One of the student team asked 'what about the families who live too far away?' The students were able to problem solve a solution, with just a little bit of encouragement from me 😇 Within the promotion of the event, families who can't walk from home are being encouraged to 'Park and Stride' from Jack Ring Park (Rivervale) or J Lee Reserve (Lathlain).

We opened the supplied promotional pack and were excited by the stacks of tattoos.

We spent some time designing promotional posters and placing them around the school with the supplied promotional posters from National Walk To School Day promotion pack.

The students also want to create a 'Walk to School' book corner in the library and selected some books from the library database. Below is a photo of the current Mothers Day book corner.

We jotted down all of the ways we will promote the activity and event on the whiteboard:

I have sent an email to the teaching staff attached a pdf of the extended version of the '10 tiny things' activity in case they might like to use it as reference to extend the lesson around the benefits of walking to school.
I'll also be sending another round of SDERA resources related to safely walking to school closer to the time to be shared on see saw as a further promotion of the event and road safety messages.

The team have set an ambitious goal of 50% participation in W2SD, but will be happy to beat 2018s rate of 30%. One student was particularly keen to measure the positive impact that W2SD has on the carbon footprint - I agreed to do this with the team as a follow up activity using the Hands Up Survey data.