Adventure To Fitness- No Barriers!

Hello Adventurers!

I wanted to let you in on an update from HQ! The number of schools, teachers, and minutes used is rapidly increasing! We are seconds away from 6,000 schools, we are over 25,500 teachers, and up to this very second, physical activity has increased with Adventure To Fitness by 3,153,784.5 minutes!!! That is pretty incredible and as always we thank you the teachers for jumping on board and getting your kids healthy!

Mr. Marc was also just in San Antonio spreading the word this week and soon he is heading to Chicago to do just the same! But he's doing more than just that. Remember in a previous post I mentioned the Mr. Marc Skype visits with the top classrooms in the nation? Well that has been going full speed! Updates and highlights on that to come but...

There IS something very interesting I want to share with you. We planned a Skype visit with one of the schools over in Alaska. That is cool all on its own. But to top it off, this school is very unique. The school is in a village community of Razdolna which is an Old Believer Russian village. They have isolated themselves in order to preserve the culture and so the school is located within the village for the children there. However, physical activity is of course important to them as well. They have no gym and so wondered what they could do to get the kids active during the school day. Then along came Adventure to Fitness! That is what struck us over here at HQ: With the use of technology, everyone can be reached. There are no barriers! We are reaching people everywhere as long as they have internet. Even remote areas. As Mr. Marc says in the episodes, "Nobody gets left behind." We try to do that by making sure every teacher hears about us and our mission! This way, every child can have the opportunity to get fit with Adventure to Fitness!

So remember teachers, you are one of many as part of this mission and we want your kids to be inspired to move! So, "Just Hit Play!"

As always, keep it moving, my friends!

Adventure To Fitness- Great Practice

Hello everyone!

We have had some calls and emails asking about the best ways to implement Adventure To Fitness into the classroom and I first want to say thank you for asking! We have some concepts that can help and I wanted to share with you:

Repetition

Kids benefit from repetition. I know I'm preaching to the choir about repetition (you probably have dreams of the alphabet and multiplication tables every night! Ha)! Teachers are amazed when we say that many of the schools across the nation that use Adventure To Fitness work our program into their schedules for the kids 3 times a week! Most include it once a week on the same day every week so the kids know to expect it and get amped for it. For 3 times a week, you might be thinking: "Wow... those schools must have teachers who just put this on so they don't have to teach the kids anything." But that is the farthest thing from the truth! I was actually curious about that myself, so I looked into all of our high user schools (I'm a realist, you see) and time after time I was finding that they are exemplary schools- A schools that are recognized for their achievements in academics and various other efforts. Good job to you all! In getting some of their feedback, they said that they pride themselves in keeping the kids engaged and steadily motivated through out the day. The episodes help do that! This goes back to the times I have mentioned that physical activity helps activate the brain for better attentiveness, retention and memory recall. 

So, great implementing of the program: Repetition! Finding at least one time a week where you carve out 30 minutes to do a full episode with the kids. (P.S. I personally know what a Sherpa is now after watching the "Abominable Ascent" episode a few times!) Repetition will help your students retain the academics included in each episode. It will also teach them the value in being physically active if they know that at certain times each week, they will be exerting some energy. That's what this is all about anyway! Keeping kids healthy.

Reinforcement

Before and after episodes, we suggest reinforcing the academic elements from the episode. They just learned about the Mayans in an episode? Try reinforcing the facts with our activities that we have pre-made for you! I know teachers love to see activities that are ready to use! Try them out because that repetition about, say, the Mayans can help out a lot when you're doing a lesson on them! Use the Episode Standards guide in the PDF format next to the episodes to help you understand what subjects the episode applies to. 

Revitalizing

Maybe you don't have enough time in your day to carve out a whole 30 minutes for an episode. That's OK! Adventure To Fitness episodes can be stopped, paused, re-wound and fast-forwarded however you need. Give your kids a brain break from the monotony of sitting at their desk writing and listening to lectures. They need movement too! So get them up for even just 5 or 10 minutes with a quick clip from one of our adventures. This helps to get that blood flowing again, giving them a little more energy to get through the rest of the day. Some teachers have even written about how they use Adventure To Fitness as a reward. If their students do well on a test, or behave exceptionally well, they put on an episode, and the kids love it! As you can probably remember being a student yourself, class was always more fun when the teacher did something out of the ordinary (even if it was study-oriented!). So revitalize your students and your day by getting everyone up and moving!

Repetition, Reinforcement, Revitalizing! Implement these concepts and your students are on their way to becoming some top adventurers who are healthy and ready to take on whatever you give them!

As always, we are here for your questions and comments so don't be shy! 

Keep it moving!

Adventure To Fitness- Keep It Moving Tour

We at Adventure to Fitness recently came off our Fall 2011 Keep It Moving Tour and boy was that a ride. We visited the top schools around Florida and the kids went WILD for Mr. Marc!!! It was so refreshing for all of us to see how much Adventure to Fitness has made an impact on the lives of these young kids. I realized we're impacting the health of these kids in a way that can help them make smart and healthy choices for the rest of their lives. An idol of theirs (Mr. Marc) is running with them for 30 minutes a week (if not more! Which with most of these classes, was much more!) and encouraging them to eat nutritional foods while taking them across the globe! If you had one of your favorite actors come hang out with you and exercise each week, you think that would effect your choices? Oh my goodness, I'd want to be healthy and fit and ready to run. I'd want to carry on those habits. Especially if that person made doing the exercise something fun to look forward to.

Random thought: I also really liked how, aside from the kids being huge fans of Mr. Marc as a celebrity, they were also just itching to show him how fit they are. If he was talking about one of the bicycle fitness moves in an episode, all the kids would "ironically" start leaning back and their feet would just start levitating somehow- waited for his permission to start doing the bicycles. Once they did, they pushed hard and had a great time.

Well I digress...

Once the kids would calm down enough for Mr. Marc to speak, he was able to get into the importance of eating healthy to support Mega Mode fitness levels. He also touched a bit on how eating healthy and exercising are great on their own but that they help get our brains moving as well (Sound familiar? Like a previous blog post or something ;) ).

Then he would open up the floor to location ideas the kids would have for future episodes. Let me tell you, those kids were a riot! So creative! I think the top ideas from all our visits were probably to have an under water episode and a planet episode. So we'll see what we can do ;)

We have a video we made with pictures and footage from the tour at various schools. You can view it at our youtube channel. Here's the link: Fall 2011 Keep It Moving Tour Video

Thank you to those of you who participated and thank you for your great feedback about the visits. It was a pleasure and a lot of fun :)

Now, we have moved onto our Mr. Marc Skype visits! We're on a mission to honor the top 5 Adventure To Fitness teachers in each state with a personalized Skype visit from Mr. Marc. With over 25,000 teachers enrolled across the United States, it really takes an impressive class to be ranked in the Top 5!!! So congratulations to all of those who are going to get the chance to Skype with Mr. Marc for being such great fit and healthy adventurers.

We do these sort of rewards for great classrooms occasionally so keep it moving and one day, maybe your class can be visited or Skyped in too!

For now, we at HQ hope that you have a great week and as always, Keep It Moving!!!!