Adventure To Fitness - For ALL students

Hello fellow Adventurers!!! I hope that all is going well! Here at HQ, we are celebrating! Why? Because we just passed 5,000 schools today across the nation! We were excited when we reached 20 schools. But this is great! Congratulations to all of our schools, our teachers and kids. Thank you for keeping it moving and getting more people on board with living healthy lifestyles- bodies and minds.

A sweet encouragement during my day is that Mr. Marc and I get to look through all of the fan mail - from the cute little ones with the squiggly attempts of drawing Mr. Clock and then from our great teachers who have offered us generous thanks and insight on how Adventure to Fitness is helping their students. I was just going through some of Mr. Marc's fan mail when I stumbled upon this gem and thought I would share it. If any of you know teachers working with special needs children or if you are such a teacher yourself, this program is also for your students so spread the word. In fact, we have gotten many messages and phone calls from special needs classes saying that they've never found a better fit for their kids. Talk about encouragement for us here at headquarters! (I know using the term "headquarters" may be super cheesy and perhaps reveals my age and need to feel cool with my geeky "in-crowd" language... but I'm gunna let it stick! Plus, if you've seen any of the episodes, the lingo is not new to you!)

Anyway, here is a letter from a teacher in Florida (yeah hometown!) who wanted to let people know one positive effect Adventure to Fitness has had with her autistic class:

Hi Mr. Marc,

  

Unfortunately, it is a common trait of those with autism to have unusual eating and drinking habits. They tend to eat and drink the same thing and much of it is very unhealthy such as: chicken nuggets, hotdogs, juices, sodas, chips, pizza, candies etc. They hardly ever eat any fresh fruit or vegetables although it is offered daily in our cafeteria. This is very typical of children with autism. Every year I do my best to teach them healthier eating and drinking habits. I have always encouraged the children and their parents to send in water bottles daily. The majority of my students rarely drank any water throughout the day, even with me role modeling it and teaching it to them. I had a student (4th grader) that his mother told me in the beginning of the year, that he would never drink water - only juices. The rest of my class would drink water as a last resort, and they would only drink juice throughout the day. Once we started doing Adventure to Fitness and the children were really working up a sweat, they started drinking water from our fountain in the room. They would all line up at the water fountain in the room when you [Mr. Marc] told  them to hydrate. As we continued to do more of your adventures, I encouraged them to bring in their own water bottles for their water breaks - and they did! The one student that never would drink water, is now drinking water, and ALL my other students are bringing in their own bottles and/or drinking more water from our fountain. 

My next mission is to continue to encourage healthier eating habits. I think if I tell them the healthy foods Mr. Marc eats, they will try it :) 

We look forward to the future adventures.

Ms. Brennan

ASD Teacher - NBCT

Neptune Elementary School