Family Time Fitness (Review)

Helping my family develop an active and healthy lifestyle is something I find important. As a busy homeschooling mama, it can be a challenge to plan out various ways to remain active while keeping up with school and home life. Yet, exercising helps us do better in both school and house work. It improves attitudes, calms minds, and helps bodies settle down.

So when I heard we were going to review Fitness 4 Homeschool – Core 1 Physical Education Curriculum from Family Time Fitness, I was thrilled. The curriculum is for grades K – 8th or ages 5 – 13. However, my sixteen year old is doing this along with her siblings. I’ll probably end up doing it with them when my sinus’ clear up a bit. Plus, the kids are hoping to drag dad into the fun before long.

Fitness 4 Homeschool – Core 1 Physical Education Curriculum has a mini guide for the parents with an introduction to physical education, what to expect from the course, a note on safety, how to integrate physical education into your school day, equipment suggestions and substitutions, teaching tips, assessing their progress, and a couple of other helpful things to get you started.

There are 260 lessons building containing four categories of exercises: warm up, activity or game play, cool down, and outdoor activity. Each lesson builds on previous lessons, and works with a variety of ages and abilities. There are links to videos demonstrating the different exercises which I found helpful since I wasn’t familiar with all of them. Each lessons tells you the skills taught, equipment needed, and suggested recovery time between exercises/sets. There is room for flexibility and modification to the curriculum making it tailor made to your own family.

How I use this:
The lessons can be done in the house (we tried it), but we all much preferred the outdoors. Our backyard isn’t done, so for now, we head to the park. Before I do a lesson, I read through it, and we all watch the videos to make sure we know what to do for each exercise or activity.

At first, I bought a playground ball, a couple of jump ropes from Walmart (inexpensive), and hula hoops from the $1 store. I made bean bags by pouring sand into a bobby socks (size small), tying a knot, and then putting that sock inside its mate to help hold sand in, and to give them a ‘handle’- a simple and inexpensive option. We already had cones, and my phone has a stop watch. I also bought a whistle, unnecessary, but fun for mom aka coach.

I have since added two basketballs, two soccer balls, and two more playground balls. I decided the investment is worth it because they can all participate at once or in pairs, plus we want to adopt a more active lifestyle, and these will be put to use for regular play/sports as well. This is not necessary for the curriculum; you can do it with less equipment/investment. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, and this course gave me the nudge.

We bought a large net laundry bag to store and carry the balls in. One nice thing about the curriculum is that it includes one page summaries cutting down on printing, and making it easy to take with you. You can slip these into a small notebook or folder.

My thoughts:
The kids love this. I love it. We even had other homeschool kids join us for one of our lessons, and they loved it. In fact, when the rest of the homeschool kids arrived (for park day), the kids showed those kids how to do the agility course, and they did it for fun. That’s the strength of this program in my opinion. It makes the exercises fun, yet challenging. All four of the kids mentioned sore muscles when we first got started. They still feel it on some lessons. It’s working muscles even though much of it feels like play.

The price has been lowered from $199 to $57, and I feel this is a great price. Along with the curriculum, you’ll also receive encouragement emails and online webinars. It’s recommended to do five lessons per week, but a minimum of three would still benefit participants. If I’m doing my math correctly, there are enough lessons to last for a year (12 months) even if you do five a week.

Family Time Fitness is planning to release Core 2 Physical Education Program in January. They also have a Fitness 4 Homeschool High School Fitness / Physical Education Foundational Strength Course for grades 9th – 12th that looks good, too. Check out there website for more information, and a video showing an overview of Core 1.

Disclosure: I received a free curriculum to review. All information was correct to the best of my knowledge at the time this review was written. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the FTC Regulations. You can read my full disclosure policy here.