Drunk and Drugged Driving Awareness
Between Thanksgiving and New Year, 25,000 people will be injured in alcohol-related traffic accidents. In 2017, 885 people died in December from alcohol-related crashes.*
These numbers are part of the reason that December is designated at Drunk and Drugged Driving Awareness Month. Help your students use their awareness to change the trends and begin to curtail drunk and drugged driving—not just in December—but all year long.
Begin by Looking at the Numbers
Scram Systems provides a wonderful resource for teachers to illustrate the cost of drunk driving in a free and downloadable poster found here. All the statistics used in this blog were obtained from that poster. Download it, display it, and help students talk about the cost of driving while impaired. Then use the free lesson, “Designated Drivers,” from Daily Living Skills’ Transportation workbook to provide students with a safe alternative to driving while impaired.
How to Use this Lesson
Begin by discussing the poster from Scram Systems. Have students count-off by 8’s. Have each #8 person stand. Explain that, if all the students in the room represented drivers on the road, every person standing represents a driver driving drunk or drugged.
Allow students to share. Have a class discussion about the costs of intoxicated driving. In all likelihood, students will know of situations where someone was driving drunk.
Brainstorm a safety plan. Help students to create rules for safe driving, for assuring that they are only riding in cars with safe drivers, and what to do if their ride home (either from themselves or others) is unsafe.
Complete pages 38 and 39 titled “Designated Drivers” in the Transportation workbook from Daily Living Skills.
Create an Awareness Poster. Have students create a poster illustrating one of the concepts or rules they created to assure safe driving over the holidays.
For More Information
Like all books in the series, Transportation is written on a 3rd/4th grade level with bullet-point information and light, airy pages that honor teen maturity and sensibilities while meeting Indicator 13 and federally mandated transition skills. For more go to our website.
