Road safety starts with monitoring your own behaviour. Be attentive! Keep safe! Stay smart!
The ideas
We, the students of the international language club “Wonderful World” (USPU, Yekaterinburg, Russia), guided the development of the project devoted to Road Safety with Yekaterinburg Access Program Students. By completing the project activities we are able to:
• identify safe and distracted walking behaviours,
• discuss the dangers of distracted driving and walking,
• track and evaluate our own behaviour as pedestrians and passengers.
Ten combined ESL and Safety Road Classes were conducted to change students’ risky behaviours. There were several stages:
• Introduction and vocabulary work: New vocabulary was introduced which was related to the names of the traffic signs, road behaviour and action verbs.
• Discussion: We thought about where we walk - school, park, sidewalks, etc.
• Brainstorming: We explained our understanding of the terms distracted walking and distracted driving.
• Activities:
➢ We comprised a lists of safe and distracted behaviours, identifying distractions.
➢ We role-played risky behavior situations from both sides, pedestrians/passengers and drivers.
➢ We played board games.
➢ We watched presentations and had quizzes.
We discussed such topics as: child passenger safety, risks drivers face, distracted walking and driving.
The most relevant topic for our community we found was the issue of distracted walking and driving.
We monitored our own behavior on the road to school and asked our parents to do the same while driving. Then we analyzed our behavior and the behavior of our parents and decided to improve it. It became our initiative.
The initiatives
We decided that road safety depends on our own behaviour and committed to:
➢ Monitor our behavior when we go school, to ESL Classes and such for seven days. We use a special chart where we tick if we walk on sidewalks or paths; look left, right and left again before crossing the street; follow traffic rules and signals and such. We also tick if we look at the phone while walking, ignore our surroundings, etc.
➢ Analyze the results. Discuss and compare. Work in groups on how to improve our behaviour.
➢ Every student has created a coloured mini-book for his or her local school area with tips and road plans for classmates on how to make their route to school safer. The mini-book includes: a collage, a plan, a poster with the tips and some extra information.
Our target audience was our classmates, a mixed group from different schools of the local area. They appreciated our colorful mini books with the tips and safe routes to school.
