Get on your bike!

Over the last 2 weeks we've been learning about road safety and biking skills.

This week in the Hub, people from the Dunedin City Council came and taught us how to ride a bike safely. We started by learning how to check our helmets to see if we’re safe to cycle without our head being split open. Once we had made sure that we wouldn’t suffer severe brain damage if we fell off, we had to check to see that our bikes were actually safe to ride, and so we learned our bike-school ABCs. Air in your tyres, Brakes work properly, Chain/Check certain things, and seat height.

Then, after all that, the group in 19a suffered sideways rain and instead learned the road code. However, next session, we finally went on our bikes. We had four instructors, Robbie, Alex, Rowena, and someone else nobody could remember (I asked four people). We did a bit of practice on handling our bikes, and then took them out on the cycleway and broke into two groups, one went to the dinosaur park, and one went to Tainui school. Next session, we got to go out on the road, but 19 had to learn what 19a learnt during the first session.

When we got on the road we went with our instructors to learn how not to die a painful death from a head-on collision with a car. Some things we learnt were: look behind your right shoulder every fifteen seconds, ride about a meter away from the curb, and the same distance from a parked car, quite a few hand signals, such as: 👉 to indicate right, 👈 to indicate left, and ✊ to show you’re stopping.

We learned lots of things during our cycling unit, and we’d like to thank everyone at the DCC BikeSchool for putting up with us for three sessions (Oh, and for teaching us and all that), we hope that you find some class better behaved than us.

By William Ashton