By Rick Price
During
three years of teaching in the City’s Safe Routes to School program I’ve been
surveying children’s literature on bicycling.
There are some wonderful children’s books about bicycling available and
there are some absolutely terrible bicycle safety books – terrible because they
are boring and because they try to teach kids by lecturing them rather than
through creative engagement.
But
at least one book should get the award for excellence in both entertainment and
bicycle safety. It is The Bear’s
Bicycle written by Emilie Warren McLeod and illustrated by David McPhail
(Joy Street Books, Little, Brown and Company).
In a read-aloud program this book could reach elementary school kids,
seniors or parents and CSU student volunteers all at the same time.
This
story begins with a simple statement: “every
afternoon we go bike riding.” An
illustration shows a little boy and his teddy bear preparing their bikes for a
ride. The boy checks the air in the
tires and tests the brakes in preparation for the ride.
Kindergarteners
through second graders sit spellbound when I read this to a class. I ask them to look carefully for lessons they
would like to teach bear, who is the alter ego of Tommy in this book, and is
not the safest of cyclists.
The
bike ride begins with the two cyclists coasting down the driveway. Tommy (the boy) looks left and right, then
signals a right turn while bear coasts down the driveway, turns right without
stopping and picks a few apples off a tree in the yard while oblivious to
anything else around him.
The
book continues in this vein: Tommy walks
his bike across the street after first checking for traffic while bear rides
right into a milk truck. Tommy watches for
hazards such as opening car doors, debris or dogs while bear is oblivious to
all of these dangers. Tommy stops at stop signs, keeps to the right and
warns pedestrians of his approach. At the end of the afternoon he wipes
his feet before entering the house. Bear
does the opposite on all of these.
At the end of this book I ask kids what they would
tell bear to help make him a safer cyclist.
Hands shoot up. “Bear,” the kids
begin, “you should stop at stop signs.”
Or “Bear,” they’ll admonish, “you need to walk your bike across the
street” or “yield to pedestrians.”
No bicycle book is perfect. Inevitably one of the kids will raise his
hand and say, “Bear, you need to wear a helmet.” Indeed, neither bear nor Tommy wear helmets
in this book. That’s a failing, for
many, with any kids’ bike book. For me
it is a teaching moment. I never
complete my lesson without mentioning the importance of wearing helmets. The other thing about this book that makes it
less than perfect is that both Tommy and bear use bikes with training
wheels.
