Milestone Awards are for the long-term, bigger goals you help your students achieve.
Unlike Toe Tokens, which are meant to be earned by everyone, a Milestone Award is designed to be reached by the hardest working students. For the kids who refuse to miss a running day due to bad weather or those who request a makeup day following an illness. You will probably only have a few of these students in your program. These special “Milestones” are not intended to be reached by everyone.
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Wednesday, September 28, 2022
Improve Your Running Program By Recognizing Their Milestones
Monday, August 15, 2022
How Atlanta Track Club Maximizes Their Community Reach
- Goal setting
- Habit formation
- Increased physical activity
- Fun
The EZ Scan® “Community” feature provides a place for community leaders to track progress across any number of run club sites (be that schools, Y’s, clubs, or community events). Tracking progress helps ensure that all those parents, teachers, and kids involved are successful with their goals.
One example of a successful EZ Scan community using this feature is the Atlanta Track Club. Originally, Atlanta Track Club started with just 7 locations in the greater Atlanta area, but in a few short years, that number has worked up to 56! Keeping track of mileage for that many locations could be difficult, but with the EZ Scan app, tracking the entire Atlanta Track Club’s community miles is as simple as clicking a button. During the 2021-2022 school year, Atlanta Track Club recorded over 20,000 miles, averaging a whopping 20 miles per child across each of their locations.
Monday, May 23, 2022
Build Better Behavior with Running
Perhaps you’ve had this happen to you as a kid, or maybe to one of your own children: after forgetting to complete your homework or throwing a little tantrum in the classroom, you were denied recess time. Instead of enjoying recess time, you were forced to sit quietly at your desk and complete schoolwork.
It makes sense. The more kids exercise and run, the more energy they burn—allowing them to reenter the classroom with a fresher, calmer mindset. In 2010, researchers conducted a study on elementary school children, comparing kids’ behavior in class on recess and non-recess days. Without a doubt, the students were more on task and less fidgety during the recess days. Jarrett and her colleagues also noted all the children with ADD benefited from the exercise. 2
This isn’t surprising. Our customers have repeated this since the 1990s. A Mileage Club during recess reduces playground hassles and allows kids to run off their energy so they can settle down and more effectively learn.
Besides getting much-needed exercise and physical activity, run clubs also promote social interaction between peers, provide brain breaks after studying long and hard, and encourage kids to get creative and use their imaginations. But above all else, be reassured that a fun and engaging run club like Mileage Club also helps kids rein in their emotions and behavioral outbreaks.
If you aren’t running yet, don’t you think your school could benefit to improve in this area?
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Top 10 Benefits of School Run Clubs
1. Avoid Playground Hassles
Any recess monitor can attest that a variety of issues can stem from unstructured time spent on playgrounds. Children need close supervision during recess to avoid accidents and behavioral problems. After all, kids are just learning how to share, play nice, and get along with others. However, run clubs directly decrease playground troubles by releasing children’s energy and boosting moods. Though some incidents can’t be completely removed (kids will be kids!), run clubs help ensure recess stays a beneficial activity for children—and less of a hassle for teachers.
2. Reduce Childhood Obesity
Obesity can cause several health risks for children, both as children and later in life. Back in 2017–2018, a staggering total of 14.4 million children in the US were obese. To break it down even further, 13.4% of those children were 2-5 year-olds, while 20.3% were 6-11 year-olds. Run clubs help target and prevent obesity for elementary school children by encouraging regular exercise whenever possible—before class, after class, or during school through brain breaks, recess, and Physical Education.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic only worsened childhood obesity concerns. With fewer opportunities for regular exercise during this time, all BMI categories except underweight experienced significant weight rate increases. For severely obese children, they gained an average of 7.3 pounds over a 6-month period, compared to a weight gain of 2.7 pounds for healthy children. To reverse this negative trend, teachers are increasingly utilizing run clubs because of all the benefits. In fact, Fitness Finder’s Mileage Club® schools ran more than 7 million miles in the 2019–2020 school year despite the start of the pandemic.
3. Goal Setting
Run clubs allow children to track their achievements and earn rewards, which encourages them to strive for more. Mileage Club® uses an app called EZ Scan®; it tracks kids’ laps and collects data to keep them updated on how they’re doing. Most importantly, EZ Scan® allows teachers to set goals that are achievable for all students, whether they consider themselves to be active or not. This makes it easy for kids to recognize that they can do this and anything else they set their minds to, which is a great attribute to carry with them as they grow older.
4. Excitement/Engagement
When something is engaging and fun, kids will be more willing to participate—that’s what run clubs are all about! We want kids to enjoy exercise and have fun in this collaborative atmosphere, which is why school run clubs offer awards and incentives for achieving their goals.
"A study based in Canada from the 1990s found that adding rewards to their run club increased participation from children by 50%."
Recent studies have replicated that result. For Mileage Club, we incentivize kids to participate by rewarding Toe Tokens—charms that come in a variety of colors and styles that kids love to display because of their hard work. Teachers that we’ve worked with agree that rewards keep kids motivated. They say that the kids are excited to run and can’t wait to do so!
5. Reduce Sitting Time
Ever heard that sitting is the new smoking? While the phrase was originally coined to call out the sedentary lifestyle of adults through their desk jobs, driving, and TV watching, it’s applicable to children now as well. Between school and home, children are spending 60% of their day seated! Although seemingly harmless, sitting for extended periods of time can be quite harmful. For young girls who sit uninterrupted for just three hours, it can cause a major reduction in their vascular function (the body’s ability to carry blood through the veins and arteries). Because of these consequences, it’s important to get kids up and moving.
6. Brain Breaks
Run clubs provide children with the brain breaks necessary to divert their energy to a fun, stress-free activity, allowing them to reenter the classroom with their full attention. With shorter attention spans, kids need these short breaks to recoup back to the task at hand. In 2016, psychologist Karrie Godwin measured students’ attentiveness over the course of a class period. The results? Kids spent a quarter of the time distracted, meaning that shorter, bite-sized lessons with brain breaks in-between better help kids focus on their lessons and their teacher. Plus, the study promoted other benefits that brain breaks provide, such as decreased stress, an increase in productivity and brain function, and more opportunities for kids to socialize with each other. Run clubs achieve all three of these benefits, giving kids a healthy break with other students and placing them back into the classroom refreshed and ready to learn!
It’s undeniable that physical activity in a child’s day increases their ability to learn, and especially improves attention and memory. For example, one such study showed that physical fitness improved academic performance, and expressly called for schools to dedicate time in the day for gym and recess rather than scrapping those for more class time. As noted in the previous paragraph, physical activity only improves kids’ brain function by giving them an enjoyable outlet. Kids often bounce off the walls, so allowing them that time to burn off some extra energy means they can come back into the classroom with a better mindset.
8. Habit Formation
Run clubs help children form healthy habits. In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear lays out a four-step pattern to create habits that improve your health:
- Cue—the trigger for a behavior
- Craving—the motivation behind wanting to do the habit
- Response—the performed habit
- Reward—the end goal
Run clubs follow a similar framework by making regular physical activity part of a child’s routine and providing them with a tangible reward, like Toe Tokens®, at the end. With this in place, children are already well on their way to creating healthy habits that are easy to continue later in life! We highly recommend reading chapter three of Clear’s book, which contains more information on habit formation, to apply these principles to your own plans.
9. Goal-Oriented Social Activity
Sharon Hoover, a co-director of the University of Maryland-based National Center for School Mental Health, made it clear that schools “need to invest now in the mental health and well-being of our kids in a broad and comprehensive way—not just for children with learning disabilities and diagnosed mental health conditions, but for all students.” Run clubs are a great way to provide beneficial tasks to your more social students. They can lean into their communication and empathy strengths while they walk and talk with their peers. They can still achieve their goals and encourage the other kids to do the same. Run clubs are also easily adjusted to practice social-distancing guidelines; kids can still gain the benefits while maintaining safety for themselves and others!
The benefits of a run club will greatly impact students, teachers, and the community. Whether you’re starting from scratch or improving an active program, we have everything you need. to help your students be active and have fun. Get started by downloading our FREE Run Club Guide. In no time, your students will be more active, and everyone involved will have a blast.
Wednesday, March 9, 2022
The Truth About the Powerful Impact of Teachers
We all want to make a difference for our community and our children. That’s why we teach, lead, and coach—be that in the classroom, on the stage, or on the field.
As educators, we create opportunities for our kids. We make space for them to use their creativity to express themselves or challenge them to learn new ideas and new ways of thinking.We encourage them with “Yes you can!” and “Keep going, you’re doing great!” as they try harder, learn to self-regulate, breakthrough their glass ceilings, and gain more confidence.
And it is in those moments- you make a difference. And let me emphasize that point. You DO make a difference!
Creating Opportunities is Making a Difference
“The average child in our nation spends about 6.64 hours at school, every day for 180 days a year.”
A Real-Life Story of a Man Who Is Accomplishing Great Things
Nathan Martin is a man most of you don’t know, but he has accomplished great things and is right here in Jackson, MI. Nathan finished eighth at the NYC Marathon this year. But two years ago, he did even more.
“Being able to use the record to either impact kids or give somebody some person to look at and say, "Hey, he's achieved that. I can too,”