Family Time Fitness ~ Schoolhouse Review

P.E. Class. I tend to have good intentions (we'll go for a walk tonight, we'll go play at the park after we're done with school work, we'll ride our bikes to grandma and papa's). But, then the day gets away from us and, before I know it, two weeks have gone by without one moment of intentional physical activity.

I am a routine girl. It has to be scheduled for me to do it. I ride my bike to the park and back and walk three miles every morning with my mom and a couple of other ladies. They keep me on schedule. If they didn't, I would miss many days of exercise for a miriad of reasons.

So this year I added P.E. to our daily planner page. And each day I include a lesson of some kind. Sometimes our P.E. lesson really is going for a walk or playing at the park or riding our bikes. But many days we have no physical activity planned and those are the days I schedule in a lesson from Family Time Fitness.

The Crew had the opportunity to review the Fitness 4 Homeschool Physical Education Curriculum. Excellent product! (There are also programs for Schools and Co-ops.)

Family Time Fitness is now my accountability partner for physical education for my children. It is awesome! And my kids love it! They ask me all day when we are going to be doing P.E.

Because my kids are young, we have made some modifications to the program:

• Since we just moved and don't have all our stuff here, we improvise on the equipment needed. We use pillows for balls and trees outside for cones.
• We do a lot of our activities indoors. We have a good length of floor from our living room into our sitting room, so we do most of our sets there and do our stretching on the carpet in the sitting room.
• We don't do near as many sets or reps as the curriculum requires. I just modify it down to what is reasonable for their ages. Instead of a 30-45 minutes PE class, ours is more like 15 minutes. But, we are breathing hard at the end and several days we have been sore from the previous day's exercises.

I love that, although we only have Core 1 of the curriculum, we can use it for years just by adding the number of sets and reps we do and increasing the length of our class time. There is also a workbook that can be purchased separately, and separate modules (like basketball) and an online health class (even a high school level health class!)

It is great to pull out my iPad each day and go straight to the next lesson. It takes absolutely no prep time and we just jump right in on our exercises. It couldn't be easier. If there is an activity that we don't have room to do or don't have the equipment to do it correctly, we just do a favorite activity from a previous lesson.

The program has also taught us some easy new exercises that we sometimes just jump up and do in between subjects when we are needing some stretch time. We had one of those days yesterday where we were just sluggish and couldn't seem to get it together. So, we would do a subject, jump up and do an exercise from Family Time Fitness, then do another subject, and so on all day long. It make focusing so much easier when it was time to sit and learn. (I know my whole day is more productive if I start my morning with my 3 mile walk and bike ride. On the days I don't, I am unproductive all day. If it works that way for me, it works that way for my kids, too.)

And, moms and dads, just so you know ... this program ain't for sissies. If you do the exercises with your children, you'll be huffing and puffing, too. I actually think it's great that my kids see what a super job they are doing because it even makes me tired and sore!

This is one of those review products that we use every day and will continue to use throughout the rest of this school year and the next several, as well.

The retail price for the Core 1 program is $199, but there is a special ONE TIME Web Price of just $57! You pay it once and receive the entire Core 1 curriculum to download and use at your leisure. You can also upgrade to the Platinum package which includes Core 1, Core 2, the basketball module, all workbooks through 5th grade, and Home Educating Family Magazine for a total of just $137. Not sold yet? You can also try the product for FREE!

 I absolutely do recommend this product for home educating families. You can see what other families thought of the product by reading the other reviews at this Schoolhouse Review link.

{Disclaimer: As a member of the Schoolhouse Review Crew, I was provided this product free in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.}