Encouraging your child to be active early on will lessen his chances of becoming overweight. “It will also increase the likelihood that he’ll remain active as he grows older,” says Reginald Washington, M.D., chairman of the Committee on Sports Medicine and Fitness for the American Academy of Pediatrics in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. And the payoff? Regular exercise will help lower your child’s risks for heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and certain forms of cancer.

Indoor and outdoor physical activities are included in our regular program. We will get your child to be active giving him/her lots of opportunity to run around freely, to learn to throw, kick, and catch different-size balls, dance with the beat, and/or to just be happy, active kids in our playground. We will play movin’-to-the-beat activity. Play tapes with different styles of music and invite your child and a pal to dance. “Every child is born with a love of movement,” explains Rae Pica, a movement education consultant in Center Barnstead, New Hampshire, and an adviser to Sesame Street Physical Education. “If kids don’t have the opportunity to move, that love of movement gets squished out of them.”

Some of the physical activities we include in our lesson plan are:

Animal actions, parachute color match, copy cat, balloon toss, first attempt at jumping rope, the launch board catch, rolling forward, pathway movement, carpet space sit, exploring pathways, shadow tag, pathway dribble, directions, airports, letter walk, fire safety skill tag, striking a ball, egg-xactly right, bean bag scavenger hunt, safari adventure, rainbow fish to the rescue, buckets, rhythmic ribbons, the bunny trail, creative play with number rhymes, hot hoops, throw hard, big buddies, follow the leader, over, under, around and through, mulberry hide and seek, among others.

We also offer extra curriculum activities as ballet, tap, play ball and/or soccer shots. See Extra curricular classes for more detail.