Let’s get outside! Ideas, resources and inspiration for Walk to School Week (19th – 23rd May)
Are you ready for Walk to School Week, which will run from 19th – 23rd May? If not, we’re here to help! Our cut out the high carbon commute programme takes the stress out of planning by providing ideas and resources to help you and your pupils take action.
Travel to school is one of the biggest contributors to a school’s carbon footprint, but it can be challenging to address because it relies on factors outside a school’s control – such as the availability of safe routes to school and public transport.
But there are still things that school communities can do, and May is a great time to get started as the days get longer, warmer and drier.
So let’s get outside!
Ideas for Walk to School Week
If you are struggling to think of ways to get your pupils and their families to join in with Walk to School Week, then take the stress out of planning by looking at our freely available programme: cut out the high carbon commute.
This programme offers a range of activities you can work through with your pupils, including:
- Understanding how our transportation choices impact the environment
- Conducting a school transport survey
- Talking to families about Walk to School Week
- Holding a sustainable travel day
…and more! The activities come with a range of supporting resources, such as lesson plans and worksheets, presentations and letter templates.
If your school is signed up with Energy Sparks, you can also use our school transport survey tool which can be found on your pupil dashboard – take a look at the blue alerts under ‘Reminders and alerts’ (see below). If you’re not signed up yet, you can read our advice on how to run a transport survey.
As well as allowing you to take important action on climate change, this programme can help you teach pupils about key sustainability concepts alongside other core skills such as communication and leadership. You can even ask pupils or eco-teams to lead on these activities.
If you’re signed up with Energy Sparks, don’t forget to log your activities to move up our leaderboard!
Inspiration time!
Last May, St Lawrence CofE Primary School in West Sussex completed the Cut out the high carbon commute programme – and what an amazing job they did!
A group of pupils called ‘Sparks Councillors’ led two whole-school assemblies, with interactive presentations that included quizzes (take a look here*).
They also created a paper version of the Energy Sparks transport survey, and used this to take a baseline survey the week before their sustainable travel week. They then conducted the survey again at the end of the week to see whether their campaign had any effect on car use.
The Sparks Councillors also used Energy Sparks’ online tool to survey pupils on their way to school and handed out handmade stickers to those who used sustainable travel methods. Year 6 pupils who cycled to school also had the chance to win a daily ‘lucky lock’.
A letter was sent out to families to let them know what the school had planned and why this was important (see what they wrote here). Families who live too far away to walk in were encouraged instead to ‘park and stride’ in order to reduce the journey length (not to mention congestion around the school) and give pupils the chance to get some exercise before starting school.
To cap it all off, one child even wrote a press release about the school’s activities, which was sent to the local village newsletter (have a look here†).
We are so impressed with all their hard work, and we hope you can get some inspiration. It’s a great example of how activities to improve sustainability can also support cross-curricular learning.
* PowerPoint (.pptx) download
† Word Document [.docx] download
