Rosemont Elementary has 120 students in the rural town of Nelson BC. Our Health Promoting Schools Coordinator offered to host a bike rodeo for our students and suggested that we apply for a Healthy Schools Activity grant to facilitate hosting the event. As students start using their bikes in the spring, we knew this would be a good opportunity to ensure that bikes are in good shape to ride and that the students learned how to fit helmets properly and knew the rules and hand signals for using a bike on the road.
Our Health Promoting Schools Coordinator gathered community resource people to help with the event. We hosted this activity in May when students are starting to use their bikes again for the summer. The Public Health Nurse did a helmet check station to ensure that students knew how to fit a helmet and to adjust those that needed to fit better. They had a display board of how to fit a helmet. We used some of the funding to purchase some helmets through the local bike shop in order to provide some helmets to those in need. ICBC also donated two helmets to our bike rodeo to give away to students in need.
One of our local bike shops set up a bike maintenance station and reviewed the ABC’s of bike maintenance – air, brakes and chain. They helped students pump tires, checked and adjusted brakes and oiled those rusty chains that hadn’t seen lubrication in a while.
We had our local Nelson Police Department Sergeant review the rules of the road with the students using the resource Bike Smart, an ICBC Road Sense resource, which has some diagrams of the signs we need to know on the road. He also reviewed the hand signals bike riders should use while riding on the road.
Our Nelson Regional Sports Council and a representative from KidSport also helped by running the students through a bike course to help them learn rules of the road, biking safely and developing balance on the bike.
Our local Save-On-Foods donated sliced watermelon so the students had a healthy refreshing snack after their turn through the bike stations.
We hosted an outdoor assembly at the beginning of the bike rodeo and gave away two bikes and helmets to students and the rest of the helmets were given out as needed by the Public Health Nurse when a student had a helmet that just didn’t fit their head.
Each class had ½ hour to run through the 4 stations. Students enjoyed the experience and the teachers had follow-up resources to use in their classrooms to reinforce what students had learned in the bike rodeo
It was a great day and we were very appreciative of our community partners in supporting this event. Students also learned where they can go to get more information on bike safety or where they can get their bkes tuned up for the season.
It was great to receive the resource link to Bike Smarts to send home to parents so they too could learn about the rules of the road. Our Public Health Nurse gave out book marks that show how to fit a helmet. We took pictures of our community partners and made thank you cards for each of them and our kindergarten students gave those out at the end of the bike rodeo.