Fun Family Fitness
By: Treneice McNeil- Staff Contributing Ambassador & Writer
Staying fit can be quite overwhelming as an adult. Trying to balance your work life, home life, social life, and your own fitness journey can be a lot for any one person to take on. With so many daily decisions Adding on to that list figuring out ways to keep your family healthy and active can be a challenge. But luckily, it’s not impossible and with just a little thought and strategizing it could be the start of an amazing family tradition. Something that your family and as they get older their families could enjoy for years to come.
But how do you do this when you have a family of 4 and everyone likes to do different things? How about a field day! Everyone picks and leads the family through their favorite activities. With activities like kickball, softball, water balloon toss, dodge ball, and so many more. Your family is bound to work up a great sweat and a ton of laughs. Not only does it give everyone a chance to do something they love it could teach your little ones how to work together as a team, and how to be a leader in a fun and enjoyable way.
Take it a bit further and have field day in different locations. If you are in a beach area like I am, that could be the perfect place to enjoy a day with the family. Grab a cooler, beach umbrella, and items to play your favorite activities and you have fun family fitness beach edition. You could play something as simple as who could find the biggest seashell, or team up and see which team could bury the oldest member fastest. There are truly no limits to it. Not only are you working together as a family, creating healthy competition, but you are being active while spending time and creating great memories with the people you love the most.
You could only imagine the stories that would be told to later generations about your family’s field day escapades. So, take this as your sign and start planning what fun activities you and your family will be doing for your next or maybe even your first Family Fun Fitness Day.
Be Great and Be Ready
It’s called the “summer brain drain,” and it’s affecting students of all ages. During the long, hot months away from school, kids lose knowledge when they don’t engage in educational activities over the summer vacation. On average, students lose approximately 2.6 months of grade-level equivalency in mathematical computation skills. This effect is magnified with low-income students; about two-thirds of the ninth-grade achievement gap between lower- and higher-income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities during the elementary-school years.
If you think of summer brain drain as just a mere nuisance to be tackled by our nation’s teachers, think again: over one million students in the class of 2010 failed to graduate with a high-school diploma.
The national graduation rate currently stands at a dismal 75 percent, due in part to the 15 million youth unsupervised after the school day ends and an additional 24 million in need of supervision during the summer. A low graduation rate contributes to increases in unemployment, poor health, crime and drug use. It lowers America’s tax revenue and increases its public-assistance expenses. To seriously address the high-school-dropout crisis, it is imperative to redefine the education equation to include community collaborations.
These critical pieces of the puzzle — organizations like Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) — provide refuge for youth during critical out-of-school hours. They aim to give youth a place where they can continue to learn and grow as individuals so they can go on to become productive, caring, responsible adults.
To further this goal, BGCA received $1 million from AT&T to expand the “Be Great: Graduate” program that helps rising 8th and 9th graders successfully transition into high school. The Be Great: Graduate program uses established risk factors to identify youth most at risk of dropping out of high school and intervene utilizing a mentorship program, with a proven record of success. To this point, the program has focused on high-school students, but with support from AT&T, BGCA will be expanding the program to younger participants through the launch of “Be Ready.”
To learn more about the Be Great and Be Ready programs, visit www.bgca.org.