Bike week this year is 19-27 June.

Team Green Britain, founded by EDF energy is sponsoring this year's bike week.

Find out more at www.bikeweek.org.uk.

• Find out what events are taking place near you.
• Register your event if you are organising one
• Lots of useful hints and tips for participants and organisers.
• There is also a cycling calculator that calculates how much money you save by cycling to work.

I'm not all that impressed with the calculator as all you do is enter the miles cycled and it multiplies that by 40p which is the cost you can claim from the government for private miles. If I drive a Jag I'm sure it will cost me more to get to work than a Fiat Panda. They say that a health benefits calculator is on the way. How many calories do you burn per mile?

Walk to Work Week

The organisation "Walking Works" has announced that they will be holding a Walk to Work week from 26 - 30 April 2010 - an excellent incentive to walk off all those Easter Eggs! To help achieve this they have set 5 challenges:

• try walking all or part of the way to work
• try walking all or part of the way from work
• hold a walking meeting
• walk all or part of the way to the meeting
• take a walk during a lunch break

Hopefully with the weather improving it gives added impetus to get out there. If during your lunch break you fancy a walk, you could always pack your high viz rucksack with a brightsportz water bottle and off you go.

Adrenaline Alley - Social Enterprise in Action

How not to cycle to school!!!

Just visited Adrenaline Alley - very well-named indoor urban sports area in Corby, Northants which attracts BMXers and skateboarders from all over the UK and overseas to perform their amazing stunts. It is also a great facility for the young people of Corby... providing a good environment to practice their skills and keep them entertained.

It's in a converted old chicken factory now fitted out with massive ramps and jumps including the 'vert' ramp (as in 'vertical') which I was invited to slide down (this involved a tad too much adrenaline for me so I declined). We also saw kids practising stunts with their scooters and in-line skates.

Mandy Young is the genius behind this really successful project and she and her team have picked up a stream of awards for their success.

Adrenaline Alley, like BrightKidz, is a social enterprise - an economically sustainable business providing social benefits with any excess income ploughed back into the organisation. It's great to meet up with other social entrepreneurs and understand the passion behind their business.

Walking to School Poems

Gosh the walking bus is everywhere - on a recent visit to the Lake District I came across a super leaflet produced by Capita Symonds and Cumbria County Councils called "Walking to School Poems". These were the results of a competition run by Cumbria County Council as part of their "Better Ways to School" campaign. This initiative is aimed at reducing unnecessary car journeys and improving safety along routes to and from School. The poems are definitely worth a read and make you want to walk to school just so you can say them!

Never too old for a Walking Bus

Swansea University have come up with a brilliant idea to make sure that after a night out students can get home safely. They have set up their own Walking Bus which will escort students across the campus and runs every hour between 9 -2am. It will be interesting to see how popular the bus was - I wonder if they were wearing high vis because I know a great place to get some!!

Did you know that every day in Britain 10 children and young people are killed or seriously injured while on foot and bikes, this can be further broken down to 6 young people and 4 aged between 0-11.

To help highlight these statistics Brake, the Road Safety Charity have just announced that the next Road Safety Week will be held on 22 - 28 November 2010. The theme for the week is "Kids Say Slow Down", calling for all drivers to slow down, introducing 20mph limits where possible.

In the months leading up to the campaign we will be looking at ways you can get involved, so look out on our website for ways to help @ Brightkidz.co.uk

On Your Bike!

Half Term holidays are nearly upon us and what a great chance to get out with the children on their bikes and enjoy the fresh air. To ensure that they are seen why not have a look at our great range of spoke reflectors, these help you to be seen on your bike day, dusk and night… and they are really funky especially if you collect different colours. The reflectors are particularly good for increasing visibility from the side so helping you to be seen by traffic at junctions. As our motto is Be Bright Be Seen and get on your bike this 1/2 term.

Experiments with a kitchen composter

A few months before Christmas I bought a kitchen composter from evengreener.com. We already compost all our uncooked waste organic matter and I wanted to reduce the contents of our landfill load still further.
For those of you who don't know what they are a kitchen composter is a plastic box into which you can empty scraps of organic waste including cooked food. Each time you do this you mash the food down with a masher (supplied with the composter) and sprinkle bokashi bran on top. An airtight lid seals the waste in. The scraps of food don't decompose in the composter; they are kind of pickled by the bacteria in the bran. You keep doing this until the bin is full. You then leave it with the lid on for a couple of weeks to ferment after which time you can add it to your compost or dig it straight into the garden.

One of the by-products of the process is a liquid that can be drained off via a tap in the bin. This liquid can then be used as plant feed. It is a miracle feed. We had a tomato plant that had some green tomatoes on it that my daughter had grown at school and for months they had stayed green. We had given up hoping they would turn red. We started feeding the plant in November and shortly afterwards the tomotoes started turning red and ended up fully red.

It costs a bit to get started and it costs a bit for the bokashi bran but we are reducing the landfill and getting some composts for the garden and some wonderful plant feed. I thoroughly recommend this for anyone who wants to reduce their carbon footprint.

A word of warning though the liquid stinks so dilute it with some water on your houseplants!

Walking Buses go Multicolour in Medway with BrightKidz

Children from Medway's Walking Buses are being kitted out in new BrightKidz UK made waistcoats thanks to the scheme by the KM Walking Bus group and funding from Medway Council.

The first school to be presented with the waistcoats was St Andrews School in Rochester. Parent coordinator Sandra Mumford said

“There's certainly no groaning when I tell them to put them on now in fact they can't wait to wear them.

“They've proven so popular that I have had another eight children register on the bus since they've seen them.”

Spring Walk to School Week

Is spring round the corner? Living Streets believe so as they have just announced the dates for the Spring Walk to School week, running from 17th to 21st of May. It may seem a long way off but if you want to get your school involved its never too early to start planning.

This week is a great way to get everyone thinking about walking to school. They can try it for the week and then hopefully adopt it for the longer term. We've got lots of handy hint and tips for just the job with lots of items that can be given away as prizes and incentives for the children. why not visit our website for more ideas and to down load a booklet on ways to get children walking to school.

Be mine this Valentine

Be mine this Valentine - why not get that special someone something completely different which shows how you care for them but has the added bonus of keeping them seen in the evening. These rigid reflectors attach to clothing or bags and show up in car headlights. Who needs flowers and chocolates when this reflective heart lasts a lot longer.

Big Lottery Photo Shoot

Gorgeous sunshine today and lots of smiles.... but freeeeezzzzzzing cold for our photo-shoot with children from Kettering Park Junior and Park Infants schools Walking Bus.

Some time ago BrightKidz had funding from the National Lottery's 'Awards for All' scheme to help with one of our 'be safe be seen' educational projects. Today we fixed up a photo shoot with children from one of the schools we worked with at the request of the 'Big lottery' fund for publicity to show the kind of project they support.

It was actually a bit of a re-enactment in the lunch hour, as it's not a great idea to have a professional photo-shoot outside busy school gates as hundreds of other children and parents arrive in the morning! All the children who took part are regular 'walking busers' and really enjoyed being part of this special photo shoot in their different colour high vis jackets... I must say they looked stunning and loved the 'fame'!

School Travel Plans

Did you know that school travel plans can cut school traffic by between 8 and 15%. So what are school travel plans? The government has set a target that all schools will have a School Travel Plan by the end of March 2010. The aims of these plans are as follows:

• to bring about a significant reduction in the use of cars travelling from home to school.
• safer travel to and from school
• fitter, healthier, happier pupils
• greater awareness of environmental and health issues associated with walking to school

All admirable qualities and so easily achievable. For more information why not check out our website www.brightkidz.co.uk/walking-to-school/school-travel-plans.html.