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Clifton Green Primary School will be visited by our technicians for a two part bike-safety course. As you are all probably aware by now that we pride ourselves in trying to give back to the community and provide a platform to promote and advocate a circular economy. We see, all too often, a simple flat tyre puts a kids bike out of action because they don’t know how to fix it, maybe the brake needs tightening or they don’t know how to manage themselves while out and about on the roads.
What we want to achieve with this course is to arm the children with the confidence and ability to assess and solve the problems that they might encounter while fixing their bicycle. We hope that not only the children of Clifton Green Primary will benefit but many more will too. It is a great program we aim to be rolling out to support and offer a way to keep bikes safe while being used and to prevent a throwaway mentality because a bike is very simple mechanics and owner Bradley Mulhearn has tinkered with bikes since he was old enough to ride one.
The first session began with a short video on bicycle safety. We paused at a marker point in the video and let the children pick their own bikes which we had provided before re-starting the video, The reason for this was intentional as the next part of the video was about making sure that the bicycle was the right size before you ride!! So as you can imagine there was some shuffling around and changing of bikes which was engaging and helped the children apply what they were learning.
Once the video had concluded we ran through a worksheet to reiterate the importance of staying safe. The session finished off in traditional school style by setting some homework. Most of the children were probably hoping that an outside group taking the class might not have had any. Sadly they were mistaken. The task at hand was simple, we asked them to design helmets using a pre-printed template printed and made it into a competition. The winner is going to be announced in assembly at the end of the course!
So Thursday had come back to Clifton Green primary, it came around in no time and it was time to kick off session number two. Today was the 6/3/20 and things were starting to take shape. It was time to fix a flat tyre, which isn’t actually “fixing the tyre” It’s an inner tube that sits underneath the tyre that holds the air, arguably the most common place to find fault on a bicycle. Four words to describe a punctured inner tube, Irritating, inconvenient and time consuming.
All it takes is a sharp object to pass through the wall of the tyre and your in trouble. To fix the problem is very simple, if you know what you’re doing. We explained to the class that the tyre and inner tube are two different things that work together. We finished explaining some of the key things to check when replacing an inner tube followed by a demonstration. After that it was time to let the class have a go…
Ash, seen here, one of the teachers at the school got stuck in too. I’m not sure who was enjoying themselves more, the grown ups or the kids taking part! Everyone managed to complete the task and really enjoyed it. Hopefully in the future they will be able to apply this new found skill to their own bicycle.
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