Need inspiration for SAFER September?

Our annual campaign month, SAFER September, is just around the corner! SAFER September is all about getting out there, running SADD activities and spreading positive road safety messages with your peers and your community. We want to see young people shouting from the rooftops about why we need to take care on the road and why it’s so important to make safe choices when getting in the car.

Last year before SAFER September we put out an awesome blog post with some great tips to support your planning. We encourage you take a look at that to get started as it’s full of really helpful info. https://www.sadd.org.nz/sadd-blog/2022/safer-september-is-here

This year we wanted to load you up all sorts of ideas that you can use as inspiration. Sometimes it can be hard to come up with activities so if you’re a bit lost or overwhelmed, checking out the list of ideas below is a great place to start. There are activity ideas to suit all experience levels and with varying levels of commitment, so there’s bound to be some that will suit your situation. You can also check out our activity hub for more ideas or hit up your Delivery Lead for some advice! This year SADD is 38 years old so we have come up with 38 activity ideas for you to try this September!

1. Write your own road safety messages and put them in the school notices

2. Design your own road safety posters that are specific to your school audience and post them up around the school. You can also order some of our posters and put them up too!

3. Draw a giant snakes and ladders game in an open area at lunchtime and invite people to play. Ask them questions from the road code and they have to get them right in order to progress through the game.

4. Set up the ‘After Party’ interactive video at lunchtime and get small groups to go through it together. You can also encourage teachers to use it in their classes.

5. Hold a quiz! You could do this in a lunch break or make it a series for whanau time over a week.

6. Run a tyre tread checking clinic in the student carpark. measure everyone’s tyre tread and hold discussions about why it’s important to maintain a safe tread depth. Let us know if you need some tread checking tools and we can help you out!

7. Run a ‘dress up a door’ competition - challenge classes to decorate their classroom door to represent a road safety theme.

8. Set up a message board where people can add their own road safety messages. You could use post-it notes, coloured markers or make it digital using social media.

9. Run a car wash fundraiser

10. Hold a distractions obstacle course. Get students to complete a course while simultaneously completing a task that also requires their attention. Discuss how this makes things so much harder!

11. Do the “what would you miss activity” where you get people to write on a post-it note what they would miss if they were killed or hurt in a crash.

12. Hold a road safety expo with local emergency services.

13. Run a tyre changing competition

14. Run a survey to gather your school’s thoughts and experience on local road safety issues

15. Film your own road safety advertisement and play it in school assembly

16. Invite a local car dealer to bring in a vehicle and hold a discussion about vehicle safety features. You could also invite local police to take part

17. Create packs to give out to students who are getting ready to sit their learners test. Include SADD stickers, conversation cards and messages about road safety

18. Start up a Tiktok or Instagram page for your SADD group and invite everyone from your school to follow. Use this to share your road safety tips and messages

19. Soak up some knowledge - get teams answering questions from the road code, if they get it wrong the opposing team gets to pelt them with a water bomb!

20. Write messages and statistics and draw pictures on the ground in chalk to capture attention

21. Create mini road signs to place around your school and set up practice courses for navigating intersections and roundabouts

22. Fast and furious - challenge students to a task (jenga is a good one!) as fast as they can and then get them to repeat it with more time and more care. What gets better results?

23. Invite your local Police in to school and see if they can bring the impairment bus or a police car. Get students to join in a chat at lunchtime around road safety and making good choices.

24. Hold a cardboard car race - get students to decorate their cardboard car and then complete an obstacle course

25. Hold a scavenger hunt using road safety themed clues

26. Hold a road safety themed debate. Our conversation cards have great discussion questions which make for good debate topics!

27. Print off some advisory notices to place on the windscreens of student and teacher cars

28. Do a traffic observation session. Set up near the school gate or on a nearby road before and after school. What do you notice about your local traffic? Are there key issues or things happening in your area that you can investigate further?

29. Create a series of Tiktok videos about different road safety themes.

30. Design and create a SADD mural at your school

31. Set up a pledge wall where people can sign their name or add their handprint as a pledge to always make safe driving decisions

32. Hold a ‘true or false’ activity to test people’s road safety knowledge. This could be in an assembly or in a classroom environment

33. Hold a high-vis non-uniform day as a fundraiser for SADD or for your SADD group’s future activities

34. Run a sausage sizzle where students need to give a road safety message or fact to get their sausage. A local business or your local Road Safety Coordinator may be able to sponsor you and provide the sausages!

35. Show a video or a presentation in assembly and hand out conversation cards to everyone to get them talking about road safety issues

36. Set up the ‘After Party’ interactive video at a community event or sports tournament - it’s a great activity for people to engage with in between matches!

37. Head out with your local police on a breathtesting checkpoint. Check in with your Delivery Lead to see if this can be arranged in your area.

38. Run a seatbelt check as student cars leave at the end of the day. Give out spot prizes for those who are wearing their seatbelt correctly.

As you can see, there are loads of activity ideas that you can try out this September. If you’re feeling a bit more inspired now, why not let us know! Fill in the form on the SAFER September page on our website to let us know your ideas and you could win a prize pack!

Keep an eye on our social media pages over the next month as we share even more ideas and inspiration with you. Don’t forget our team is here to help so please reach out if you have any questions.

Happy SAFER September planning!!