We are partnering with CrossFit Kids to bring you information to help encourage and inspire your children to incorporate health and fitness into their every day lives and to improve their ability to learn. It's important for all online school students to spend some time every day moving, playing, and exercising - not only because in some states, it's required, but because the overall benefits to health and learning are immense!  

However, It is very important that you consult a doctor before you or your children begin any type of exercise. Always stop exercising immediately if you experience any shortness of breath, dizziness, or pain.

The posts provided by CrossFit Kids in this series are designed to explain the overall philosophy of CrossFit Kids, review some basic movements, and offer suggested workouts that can be incorporated at home. We will be reviewing different movements throughout the series and providing you with ideas to get your kids moving.  The workouts won't be anything you can't handle and you should, by all means, join in!

Remember, this should be fun!  Are you ready? 3, 2, 1...Go! 

Walk midway into a class at a registered CrossFit Kids program and you might discern the kind of energy that usually emanates from a playground during recess. There is joyful noise: laughter and thrilled shrieks and triumphant shouts. Kids are having a blast. And the trainers look like they might be having an even better time. A well-run program always looks like a boatload of easy fun. But all of that fun, as merrily hectic and aimless as it sometimes seems, is by design, purposeful. CrossFit Kids intends to teach children to associate exercise with fun, with the ultimate goal being that they will value the pursuit of fitness into adulthood.  It is the new school when it comes to physical education.

But when parents find themselves acting as their child's learning coache at home, that sense of easy fun can become decidedly uneasy. The urge to get their children to a registered CrossFit Kids program can become strong. But that is not necessary.

The mobile photography explosion has revolutionized the way we capture the important (and not so important) events in our lives. Smartphone owners (and a great many “dumb phone” users too) now carry cameras with them everywhere they go, cameras with the ability to share photos with the world in an instant.

As a result, people today take many more pictures than we used to. We take photos of ourselves, our kids, and the big and small events in our day, right down to what we ate for lunch.

While camera phone technology is continually improving, these devices do have their limitations. Still, the best camera is the one you have with you. An iPhone is better than a Canon DSLR when the Canon is at home in a bag!

National Poetry Month was started in 1996 by The Academy of American Poets, and is a month-long, national celebration of poetry! Their goal, then and now, is to widen the attention of individuals and the media—to the art of poetry, to living poets, to our complex poetic heritage, and to poetry books and journals of wide artistic range and concern.

There are so many hidden poets out there, including, Phoenix Suns co-owner Richard Jaffe, who recently published his first book of poetry. Jaffe offers five ways we can all benefit by tapping into our inner poet:

1. Improves cognitive function. Learning new words (he’s never without a Thesaurus), working out meter (math!), and finding new ways to articulate our thoughts and feelings (communication) are all good for the brain. Want to get smarter? Write poetry!

2. Helps heal emotional pain. Grief is one of the most painful emotions we experience, and it’s also the source of some of the world’s most inspirational poetry, Jaffe says. “When I have experienced a profound loss, the act of putting my feelings into words or memorializing and paying tribute to those who I lost is extremely cathartic,” he says.

3. Leads us to greater self-awareness. Most of us don’t have the time or desire to just sit and aimlessly ponder the meaning of our lives or what makes us deeply happy. Writing poetry gives us a constructive way to do that. Not only does it help us explore and gain insight, we have something to show for all that “inner reflection” when we’re done.

4. Provides a gift of inspiration or education to others. One thing we know -- we are not alone! “Universal questions, fears and emotions are called ‘universal’ because everyone, no matter what country or culture they’re raised in, experiences them,” Jaffe notes. Once we’ve done the work of exploring and finding our own answers, we can help others by sharing them. 

5. Celebrate! For some things, balloons and cake just don’t suffice. “Proposing to my wife, the births of my children, their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, falling in love -- these were among the most emotionally powerful, joyful times of my life,” Jaffe says. “Thanks to the poems I wrote at the time to capture those feelings, I can experience them again and again.

To do our part to encourage all of the would-be poets out there to celebrate National Poetry Month, we have created the first annual K12 Poetry Contest!

We are partnering with CrossFit Kids to bring you information to help encourage and inspire your children to incorporate health and fitness into their every day lives and to improve their ability to learn. It's important for all online school students to spend some time every day moving, playing, and exercising - not only because in some states, it's required, but because the overall benefits to health and learning are immense!  

However, It is very important that you consult a doctor before you or your children begin any type of exercise. Always stop exercising immediately if you experience any shortness of breath, dizziness, or pain.

The posts provided by CrossFit Kids in this series are designed to explain the overall philosophy of CrossFit Kids, review some basic movements, and offer suggested workouts that can be incorporated at home. We will be reviewing different movements throughout the series and providing you with ideas to get your kids moving.  The workouts won't be anything you can't handle and you should, by all means, join in!

Remember, this should be fun!  Are you ready? 3, 2, 1...Go! 

If you remember from an earlier post, functional movements are exercises that are fundamental to all things that kids need to do when they play--- pull, push, run, throw, climb, lift and jump.

The squat is one of the most functional movements in the CrossFit Kids repertoire. Its value as a central exercise in a strength-and-conditioning program and its basic utility in the real world are well-established.