Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.
Incentive charts can be hard to design. When I make one, I tend to end up with a very basic grid. These work, but they sure aren’t attractive. Sometimes, it’s nice to have something pretty and fun, though. It’s great, for non-techy, uninspired people like me, when someone else does the hard work and designs a pretty, fun chart. I was offered the use of the Healthy Habit Trackers from American Coaching Academy last month, in order to write a review.
The Healthy Habit Trackers were designed to get children off screens and moving. Each of the 12 pages that come in one PDF has a list of five or six habits, with a 30-day checklist to help get these habits established in the life of the user. Most of them focus on exercise, while a few involve healthy eating. One even has common household chores! One page is a yoga challenge; I didn’t even print that one.
Quite a variety of exercises are included. The Flexibility Challenge includes 30 seconds each, doing a quad stretch, touching toes, a hamstring stretch, butterfly stretch, neck stretch, and v-stretch. The muscular endurance challenge includes one minute each of wall sit, run in place, high plank, crab bridge, and wall pushups.
I also like the Kindness Challenge, which encourages giving a compliment, sending a text or email to a friend, giving a hug to someone, or holding the door open for someone. There is also a Nutrition Challenge. To fill in this chart, a child would need to drink five glasses of water, and eat two servings each of fruit, vegetables, lean protein, and grains. This chart has fun drawings of various foods from each of these groups to fill in.
Each chart is shaped differently. Some are spirals, some are calendar pages. One is a rainbow, and one is shaped like honeycomb. Each chart is colorful; Miss Joy badly wants to cut the pictures out of each one!
Now, how did we use this? Well, I’ll have to admit that we didn’t use it very well. I printed all the pages (except yoga, of course), and had the school children look them over. Each of them chose a page, as did I, and we did the exercises on our page that day. It was rather fun, doing exercises all together. Miss Joy positioned herself right in front of me, and imitated my every move! For several days, the children kept doing their exercises and filling in their charts, but then life happened. Our children get a lot of exercise anyway, caring for the animals, so I’m not too concerned about getting them off screens (which they don’t get much of, anyway).
More useful than the Healthy Habit Trackers is the bonus that came along: a set of blank habit trackers! They are just as pretty as the main set, but I can fill in any habits I want to establish. We’ll definitely be using those at times. I like having incentive charts I don’t have to design myself.
If you are in need of a physical education program for your homeschool, definitely have a look at the Healthy Habit Tracker from American Coaching Academy. This might be just what you need. And, be sure to click on the image below to read reviews from other families. I’m sure some of them found this product much more useful than we did.
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