It was nothing but smiles at last Thursday's Family Engagement Workshop at Macquarie Primary School. Families from the school were invited to come along to the workshop to learn how parents and their children can ride safely to school together. It was a hands on workshop where both parents and their children hopped on their bikes and participated in fun bike activities.

A big thank you to Faith Bentley and Macquarie Primary for holding the event, Stu from Trek Bicycle Canberra for educating parents on bike sizing and maintenance, Fyshwick Fresh Food Market and Wiffens - Premium Green Grocers for providing a healthy snack for all the workshop participants.

To find out how you can engage your students through active travel, head to https://paf.org.au/ride-or-walk-to-school/

It was high fives all around at yesterday’s Safe Cycle TQI Professional Development Session. A massive thank you to Amaroo school for hosting the session. The TQI session focussed on how to engage students in active travel through incorporating the use of bikes into PE sessions. The teachers participating in the session were given a hands-on lesson on different bikes-based games they can use to make their classes more engaging for their students.

Our Ride or Walk to School program is designed to drive culture change within local schools to be more active by riding or walking to school. The program offers a set of bikes to hire for FREE that teachers can use to teach students about bike safety and the benefits of actively travelling to school.

2019 Bike Hire bookings are now up! To hire the bikes head to https://paf.org.au/ride-or-walk-to-school-bookings/

Trek Bicycle Canberra

It was great to get out and see Telopea Park School getting involved with our It's Your Move - Safe Cycle program with 31 students getting involved in an obstacle course! Telopea Park School is one of our hardest working schools and to celebrate their hard work, we delivered a voucher to take the students to Bloc Haus for some more active fun!

For more information on the It's Your Move - Safe Cycle program, email info@paf.org.au.

For schools already on the program! The 2019 hire bikes are now up for grabs! Head to http://paf.org.au/its-your-move-bookings/ !

To end Ride Safe to School Week, we would like to shed some light on a school that has been actively promoting the Ride or Walk to School program this year! Below is a description of Forrest Primary School's, Ride Safe to School Week activities.

"Forrest Primary have been taking huge leaps in how we as a school take authentic action. For the first time, the students are taking charge of the Ride Safe to School Week and are using it to raise awareness of air pollution from cars. Every bike ridden to school means one less car polluting the air! The students will be collecting data and using it to promote how much pollution was saved from entering the atmosphere at the end of the week. We are also having raffle giveaways each morning for riders as well as a bike safety check day on the Wednesday."

To help celebrate Forrest Primary Schools' hard work, the Ride or Walk to School Program delivered a Trek Bicycle Canberra voucher during their event.

One of our RWTS schools held a scooter day for their Kindergarten students, it looks like they had a great time and how cute is the teddy bear? Here is what they had to say about the day.

"Kindergarten kicked off their Scooter Program at St Anthony’s Primary School with great excitement today. We started our lesson off in the Hall, arriving to find Accident Teddy had had another mishap.

The children worked out that he hadn’t started his scooter lesson very well when he forgot to buckle up his helmet and he rode his scooter off the stage. Uh-oh!

We decided we weren’t going to do the same. It took us a lot longer than expected to get started, with many of the children’s helmets not fitting correctly, so we had to do quite a bit of adjusting before we started.

We followed the three 2s check:

- The rim should sit about ‘2 finger’ widths above your eyebrow.
- The straps should not be twisted and should form a V just under the ears with the’2 ear clips’ snug under the ears.
- The strap should fasten securely under the chin and not hang loose, snugly fit ‘2 fingers’ under the strap.

A helmet needs to be secure, but not uncomfortable. It should fit flat on heads, not tilted back.

We did get outside for a quick ride around where we were able to assess where the children were at. And of course we can’t wait to do it all again next week!
A great kick off for our Ride Safe to School week."