Inspiring Kids to Get Active and Stay Healthy

Every year, National Exercise Day is celebrated on April 18th as a reminder of the importance of physical activity for people of all ages. While adults may think of exercise as going to the gym or running, for kids, exercise should be all about fun, movement, and play.

With increasing screen time and busy schedules, many children aren’t getting the recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity. As parents and educators, we have the power to make exercise an enjoyable and natural part of kids' lives. Here’s how we can celebrate National Exercise Day and encourage kids to stay active all year long.

Why Exercise Is Important for Kids

1. Builds Strong Bodies

Regular exercise helps develop strong muscles and bones, improves coordination, and enhances flexibility. It also helps prevent obesity and promotes a healthy heart.

2. Boost Brain Power

Active kids tend to focus better in school, retain information more easily, and perform better academically. Exercising has been shown to improve memory, problem-solving skills, and creativity.

3. Improves Mood and Reduces Stress

Physical activity releases endorphins, the “feel-good” hormones that help reduce stress, anxiety, and even symptoms of ADHD. Exercise helps kids feel happier, more relaxed, and ready to take on challenges.

4. Encourages Social Skills

Group activities like playing tag, riding bikes with friends, or participating in sports teach teamwork, communication, and leadership skills.

5. Establishes Healthy Habits for Life

When kids learn to enjoy physical activity from a young age, they are more likely to continue exercising into adulthood, reducing their risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

How to Make Exercise Fun for Kids

The key to getting kids excited about exercise is to make it feel like play rather than a chore. 

Here are some creative ways to keep them moving:

1. Turn Exercise into a Game

• Obstacle Courses - Set up cones, chairs, and ropes in the backyard or living room for kids to jump over, crawl under, and race through.

• Scavenger Hunts - Create an active scavenger hunt where kids have to run, jump, or do a silly move to find clues.

• Freeze Dance - Play music and have kids dance. When the music stops, they have to freeze in place.

2. Get Moving as a Family

• Go for a walk, bike ride, or nature hike together.

• Have a family dance party or do a kids’ workout video.

• Play interactive games like charades or Simon Says with an active twist.

3. Incorporate Exercise into Daily Routines

• Take the stairs instead of the elevator.

• Walk or bike instead of driving when possible.

• Do quick movement breaks in between homework or screen time.

4. Encourage Outdoor Play

Fresh air and movement go hand in hand! Encourage kids to:

• Play at the park or playground.

• Ride bikes, scooters, or roller skates,

• Climb trees, jump rope, or play hopscotch.

5. Introduce Sports and Activities

Not all kids enjoy traditional team sports, and that’s okay! Help them explore different options like:

• Swimming

• Martial arts

• Gymnastics

• Dance

• Rock climbing

• Yoga

6. Use Technology in a Healthy Way

If kids love screens, use them to encourage movement! Try:

• Interactive video games that involve dancing or sports.

• Fitness apps with fun challenges for kids.

• Virtual reality (VR) games that require physical movement.

Celebrating National Exercise Day in Schools and Homes

For Educators:

• Organize a school-wide fitness challenge with fun activities throughout the day.

• Plan active learning breaks where kids do jumping jacks, stretches, or quick games between lessons.

• Host a relay race or sports day with different activity stations.

For Parents:

• Plan an active playdate with friends at a park or trampoline gym.

• Set up a daily movement goal and reward kids for completing it.

• Take an evening walk or do a fun physical challenge together

Making Movement a Habit

National Exercise Day is a great time to introduce new ways to stay active, but the goal is to keep kids moving all year round. By making exercise fun and engaging, we can help children develop a lifelong love of movement that will benefit their physical and mental health for years to come. 

Meeting SHAPE Distance Learning Guidelines

We have selected a handful of action points from the SHAPE Distance Learning Guidelines on the left and show how Fitness Finders can help you meet them on the right.

Curriculum

“Continually assess and revise online courses to keep up with trends, technology, and content.”

Fitness Finders does this for you! Our EZ Scan® app automatically updates at no extra cost and works with the latest devices. Content changes are based on current trends in physical education and feedback from users in all 50 states.

“Address all state and/or national physical education content standards, including any other required standards (Common Core, ELA, Technology, etc.).”

Getting the recommended 60 minutes of activity a day is no problem with Mileage Club®. Mileage Club works before, during, or after school. It can be done outdoors, indoors, and even at home. And it’s an easy, low-cost way to get and keep kids moving. Mileage Club is flexible, accommodates all students, and kids love the rewards. It is the best way to meet multiple state and national standards for physical activity.

Learning Environment

“Get parents involved with their child’s learning.”	Parents can be involved in Mileage Club in many ways! From simple encouragement as children reach their goals to walking laps with them. Parents can be there for their kids every step of the way! With EZ Scan, teachers can share their child’s individual reports with parents to keep them up-to-date on progress. For greater involvement, teachers can send the EZ Scan Activity Recording Sheet & Instruction or a QR Card with instructions home to parents.
“Allow for student choice so students can choose where, when, and how to be physically active.”	Flexibility is a critical component of Mileage Club® and EZ Scan®. Complete laps any time of day - anywhere! Set a course anywhere you’d like and record laps, reps, and minutes of activity – anyway, they can be done! A great resource we offer is our EZ Scan Activity Recording Sheet & Instruction has the equivalency chart with the purpose of allowing the choice of exercise by converting any activity to minutes of walking/running. Available online or by mail.
“Balance screen time and physical activity time.”	With EZ Scan®, you can access reports that give time stamps and quickly let you see the amount of time spent walking/running!

Assessment

“Utilize technology to verify participation and support learning gains in physical activity to meet the CDC physical activity recommendations of 60 minutes of moderate- to vigorous physical activity per day.”

As mentioned before - EZ Scan® will do this job for you! Just have the students scan their laps or minutes of activity. You’ll be able to generate reports with all of the information needed to know if students are getting their 60 minutes of exercise per day.

Standards-Based Instruction

“Students compare and contrast data collected (e.g., heart rate, video of the performance) against criteria and/or previous analyses.”	EZ Scan reports can be generated in any time frame that you’d like. So, comparing results from day-to-day or week-to-week will be a breeze. As an account administrator, you will just need to send them the data, such as the individual student report and timed run reports. Both of these would allow students to compare and contrast their progress over time.
“Students generate data (e.g., heart rate, number of sit-ups, etc.) by performing health-related physical fitness assessments.”	Let EZ Scan make your timed run very EZ. Students simply scan a QR card with each completed lap. The report details the # of laps, total time, and splits for each student.
“Students choose, present and/or discuss relevant assessments to measure a physical fitness component (e.g., muscular strength, agility, coordination)”	EZ Scan reports provide relevant metrics related to distance and frequency as well as progress overtime. Also, equivalencies give a great framework for time-based, calorie-based, and distance-based comparisons.

More Takeaways!

“One of the four essential components of physical education is assessment — the gathering of evidence about student achievement in all areas of instruction to make inferences about student progress.”	An assessment has never been such a quick task! The reports generated from an EZ Scan account can give you all the data you need to present to students, parents, and administration showing off how much they have accomplished in your run club in a given timeframe. One great example is the Timed Run reports.
“Activity tracker - Activity trackers are wearable devices or computer applications that record daily physical activity along with other data relating to fitness or health, such as heart rate, the number of steps taken, or even calories burned.”	EZ Scan is the #1 lap tracking software on the market. Not to mention it is affordable – only $149.95/year and handles up to 1,500 students! Plus, if you ever need help, we offer free tech support Mon-Fri during our office hours.
“Verification of learning is perhaps one of the teachers’ biggest concerns with OLPE (Daum & Buscher, 2012; Trent 2016), while students struggle with the meaningfulness and challenge of assignments. Creators of online courses need to pay special attention to meaningful assessments that challenge students in real-world contexts.”	Verify that your students are learning by allowing them to complete the same exercises at school as they will at home. This can quickly be done with Mileage Club and equivalencies because, as we’ve mentioned, they can be completed anytime, anywhere, to give your students real-world context through independent work! When you choose to start a Mileage Club, it will be the last curriculum choice you have to make for incorporating structured physical activity. Mileage Club is so simple that you will only need to teach the lesson once. After that, students know to get their QR Scan card and scan as they complete laps to earn their awards. No more worrying about coming up with new lesson plans on the fly.
“All students must be afforded the same opportunities to participate in public school programs. The students must be provided accommodations and modifications as necessary, based on the individualized education program (IEP) team decisions.”	Mileage Club can be done by anyone, anywhere, any time of the day and our equivalencies make this even more true as they can turn any activity into minutes walked/ran, such as pushups if they are unable to go outside. You can accommodate all interests and abilities.
“Teachers must make more of a concerted effort to connect when in a distance learning environment. Students need to feel like part of their school community and that they are cared for to learn. Develop strategies to connect with students if your school/ district will not be facilitating online learning or if students will not be able to meet online due to limited accessibility at home (e.g., create assignments focused on getting to know each other, facilitate pen pals).”	Connect with students by achieving personal and group goals together! Start a Mileage Club program and keep track of their awards and data with EZ Scan. You can do this for one school, or connect your entire district! Plus, they will be able to participate in the same program from home or at school. When they have reached their goals, be sure to give them a physical reminder of their success, such as a Toe Token and a necklace to display it on.

Bonus Thoughts from Fitness Finders

“Do an inventory of your current curriculum and determine which lessons or activities can be repurposed as at-home work or for online use (depending on students’ access to technology). There may be lessons or activities within your current curriculum that can easily be adapted for students to complete at home or online.”	Mileage Club seamlessly adapts to a home learning setting. With EZ Scan, you just make sure your students have their QR card and can log in, and they can get moving. Parents are also able to help out by becoming scanners and supervisors. As an administrator, you can securely give parents access to EZ Scan to allow students to use the same software to complete laps like they would at school.
“Make sure expectations are realistic for students, especially for younger students if they require assistance from an adult to complete assignments. Consider the home dynamics of your students as referenced earlier in the section on Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility.”	Setting realistic expectations to be met from home can be a tough job. However, EZ Scan and Mileage club make this easy! Mileage Club can be done by anyone at any time. If they’re unable to complete laps, just have them use the equivalency chart. If they can complete laps, have them use EZ Scan to record their data. If they can’t use EZ Scan, just have them send you a recording sheet that you can manually enter into the system. Because EZ Scan is so simple and because we have you covered for all situations, you can expect all of your students to get the proper amount of activity at home without making it unrealistic.
“Can special events or activities still be done remotely (e.g., At-Home Family Field Day)?”	Mileage Club creates consistency because it can be done both at school and at home. So, if the time comes where you have a shift to online learning, your curriculum is already setup, and the students know exactly what to do! The program can be done at the same time each day, and completing laps for mileage is a consistent activity by nature as each can be done the same way each time. Special events and activities can still be done at home, just like at school. Host field days, award days, jog-a-thons, or even just daily sessions remotely with ease. This allows you to maintain critical ESL components of teaching and will give your students structured activities that can be done when they are away from school. This is also true even if some students are learning from home while some are in class.

Children Dive into a Pool of Benefits by Learning to Swim

Three Reasons to Swim

·      Survival

“Only 56 percent of Americans can perform the five, core swimming skills1.” That’s nearly half our country that can’t swim! And over 70% of the world is covered with water. That percentage doesn’t include the thousands of swimming pools and even bathtubs around the world. (Did you know you can drown in just a few inches of water?!) Chances are that in a person’s lifetime, they’re going to encounter a situation that involves them being in or around water.

 

Physical Fitness

Swimming works both cardiovascular health and almost every major muscle in the body. You can also target certain muscles by doing different strokes or workouts such as leg lifts while using water resistance.

On top of that, water will remove most of the natural stress on your bones and joints because of the lack of gravity. It’s one of the reasons that people use this activity for physical therapy.

Increase Overall Quality of life

When kids learn to swim, they decrease their fear of being around water and have a chance to take part in so many new activities. These activities such as boating, canoeing, kayaking, water skiing, etc. can bring joy and new experiences into their lives.

Swimming also reduces stress! You get to give your brain a break by focusing on your exercise and staying afloat. Also, just like any other aerobic exercise, it increases endorphins.

Fun Facts About Swimming

• Elephants can swim as many as 20 miles a day — they use their trunks as natural snorkels!
• Niagara Falls has enough water to fill up all the swimming pools in the United States in less than three days!
• The bikini swimsuit was named after a U.S. nuclear testing site in the South Pacific called Bikini Atoll.
• In butterfly stroke and breaststroke, swimmers need to touch the pool with both hands simultaneously when they finish. Swimmers touch the pool with only one hand when they finish in freestyle and backstroke swimming events.
• An hour of vigorous swimming will burn up to 650 calories. It burns off more calories than walking or biking.
• Swimming is a great cardiovascular exercise because you are moving against the water’s resistance, which is over ten times that of the air.
• Even the smallest world nations enjoy a thriving swimming pool industry (e.g. New Zealand pop. 4,116,900 [Source NZ Census 7 March 2006] - with 65,000 home swimming pools and 125,000 hot tub pools).
• The slowest Olympic swim stroke is the breaststroke.
• The fastest and most efficient swim stroke is the crawl/ freestyle.²

¹Almost Half of America Can't Swim, Survey Says. (n.d.). Retrieved July 1, 2015, from http://time.com/106912/red-cross-swimming-campaign/

²Games & Safety. (n.d.). Retrieved July 1, 2015, from http://www.swimmingpool.com/games-safety/pool-fun/fun-facts

³http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/swimming+hole

⁴Wood, E. (n.d.). The Art of Swimming - The Morning News. Retrieved July 1, 2015, from http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-art-of-swimming