Physical Fitness Curriculum

What do you use for PE?
Every academic subject has plenty of options for textbooks, workbooks, and more, but what about PE?

This past year we decided to start from a practical perspective. We asked what they might need to be physically fit for. There is the natural benefit of being healthy, but in terms of physical abilities we felt the most likely real life application would be if they ever wanted to participate in the military.

We looked up the US military minimum requirements for physical fitness, and agreed that this should also be the minimum that we require of our children.

http://www.army.com/enlist/push-ups.html

The above link will take you to a chart for push ups and from that page you can link to minimum requirements for sit ups and for running.
These are the three areas that you would be tested in to pass Basic Training. The requirements are not exactly the same for every branch of the military, but they are similar.

To use this information; we had our children test themselves, and document where they fell on the chart. Their goal was to work their way up to passing the Basic Training Test by the end of the school year. To help them, we encouraged them to work at some form of exercise on a daily basis and to retest once a week to see how much progress they had made.

While not all of my children would be able to pass the Basic Training test today, they have all made progress since the first test, and that is the real goal. We will continue to hold the military standard as our standard until all of our children are able to pass it.

The author of this blog, Corinne Johnson is a Christian homeschooling mother of six, help meet to her husband Don, and author of Vacation Education Books (travel guides for families who love to learn, unit studies for families who love to travel).
www.vacationeducationbooks.net