Germany's top MobileKids this school year come from Aachen! The Brander Feld primary school convinced us with their comprehensive, cross-curricular project with its peer-to-peer approach: in a ten-part teaching unit, the children of classes 1a and 1b took an in-depth look at road safety. Subjects included "See and be seen", "How do I get to school", "Listening for sounds" and "Dangers on the way to school". Under the self-chosen motto "We look out for one another", 3rd grade pupils acted as guides for the younger children, providing help and advice.
As part of the MobileKids school campaign, the 1st grade pupils looked first at their own routes to school, discovering dangerous areas and marking the different routes on a map of the town. It quickly became clear that many of the children lived relatively close to one another. With the aid of their maps, the children agreed on meeting points where the 1st grade pupils would gather and be collected by a guide from 3rd grade. This meant that they would no longer have to cope with getting to school on their own (even in the future) and were advised about dangerous spots along the route by their older fellow pupils.
During the MobileKids school campaign, road safety was also included in other subjects. In math, for example, the children worked on "taxi geometry", calculating actual routes from A to B on their maps. The children also learned to recognise the different traffic sign shapes and their meaning. In music, the focus was on the different sounds that traffic makes. With their eyes closed, the 1st grade pupils first listened to various sounds on a CD. They included harmless sounds such as birdsong, church bells or pedestrians, and warning sounds such as car horns or sirens. Once their awareness had been sharpened, they concentrated on listening to the sounds they could hear through the open window. The children were astonished at the number of sounds that they usually blanked out. The aim was to make the children aware of audible signals amongst the road traffic. Thanks to their subsequent exploration of the school's immediate surroundings, the help of their road safety guides, their ability to spot traffic signs and listen for traffic sounds, the pupils of the Grundschule Brander Feld built up their confidence in traffic and have rightly been named Germany's top MobileKids!