Empowering Healthy Kids Blog

It’s International Walk to School Month:

Walking to school promotes health, physical activity, concern for the environment and safe and walkable communities. This year, join schools around the world as they celebrate walking during the month of October. Communities are encouraged to pick a day, a week, once a week or the entire month to celebrate. Actively promoting Walk to School for a month could also transition smoothly into the launch of a year-round program.

Examples of Walk to School activities:

• Designate “Walking Wednesdays” to encourage walking one day a week and potentially extend the event to a month or a year-long activity
• Develop walking themes for each day of the week: bright, highly visible colors day, “walking hat” day, bring a healthy lunch day, etc.
• Set up a competition with awards for the classes with the most walkers
• Offer an option to students who ride the bus or carpool to walk once they arrive at school.
• Organize a walking school bus from nearby neighborhoods. For information on how, visit www.walkingschoolbus.org
• Plan a school-wide event to recognize the day such as a picnic, an assembly, an awards ceremony or a pizza party for the class with the most walkers
• Fill the month with activities throughout the day that pertain to staying physically fit, eating healthy and caring for the environment.

See also Australian and UK examples of the Walking School Bus.

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 11:53 am and is filed under events, news, getting active, tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.