We, Colegio Montessori seniors, created a variety of activities taking into account the students’ ages. These activities were adapted in order to raise awareness about road behaviors. The whole school community was included.
Tes Idées
From August 14 to November 17, 2017, teachers proposed to us (seniors and 10th graders) a series of activities in order to raise awareness on traffic accidents. The sensitization was centered on the behaviours that are usually carried out by young people such as the consumption of alcohol and psychoactive substances, speeding, not wearing the seat-belt or to perform other activities while driving.
At this stage we were called to reflect upon our own acting and our responsibility as citizens while in use of a vehicle (whether it is a bicycle, a motorcycle or a car). With this aim, some videos, advertising campaigns, surveys and studies were done in several countries and even in our own city where some of the resources listed were used as the first step of this project.
10th graders did a newscast which had the objective to highlight and reflect upon the current situation of our streets, our culture and our social responsibility. The project was done in English with subtitles in French, and it consisted on creating a newscast; 2 articles or current news, an advertisement, an interview, news about an actual or made-up invention that will help to prevent road accidents and a farewell section of the newscaster. 10th graders were in charge of recreating situations, using technological tools for the edition and creation of images and contents. The projects were presented to the class and the best projects were chosen.
On the other hand, we, seniors were tasked to create Comics on the main risk factors. This project was innovative because we were who had to recreate the scenes and the dialogs. This activity had a great impact since we felt that these situations were not unfamiliar, on the contrary, we feel that taking wrong and potentially dangerous decisions can happen at any time.
Tes initiatives
In order to transform our lives and empower all the students to gain awareness that the problem is increasing among young people, we, seniors, were going to be in charge of leading the activities to be done with the rest of the educational community. The fact that young people were the ones in charge of sensitizing their peers ought to generate a major impact among the students. With this goal, we were divided in teams of 2, 3 or 6 students. Every group was responsible for spreading the word to the different groups from 1º-8 º (elementary and middle) during the week; from April 23 to April 27. The action consisted of the following activities:
1. Radio: “the road to saving your life”. The audience was Montessori’s French-speaking students, teachers and staff. The activity consisted of two eleventh-grade students who spoke on the school’s radio station twice a week about different aspects of safety on the road. The audio was broadcasted throughout all loudspeakers of the school in the morning.
2. Exposition of comics for students 13-14 years old (7th and 8th grades) and presentation of the best comic strip made by students throughout the year, based on the theme of road safety.
3. Awareness on traffic regulations for students from 1st to 5th grades. Each grade had specific activities: “Life in the streets” (1rst grade), “Safety first” (2nd grade), “Road Safety” (3rd grade), “Conscious children” (4th grade), “Chasse au Trésor” (5th grade).
4. “Posters” that were placed around the elementary, middle and high-school buildings and had to be complemented by oral presentations to explain to the public the reason behind the posters and their importance.
5. Conferences in which we contacted a traffic police officer to give us detail information about mobility in our city. He showed us statistics and answered our questions about traffic regulations. We also invited a famous cyclist who has a local television program. He talked about environment and he encouraged us to either walk or use bikes to move around the city.
6. “The walking bus” was an activity for the school’s students living nearby. We aimed to encourage students to go to school along a set route.
After the “Road Safety Week” we conducted a survey asking students from other grades their opinion about the event and the activities done. In general the students enjoyed the safety road week and they found it productive in terms of learning what will help them to improve their awareness and to avoid future accidents.
