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Kenyon PowerKids; Austria
Rain Forest X; France
Team E.T.; Belgium
The Mission X: International Fitness Challenge has begun. Teams of elementary students from around the globe are training their way to a healthy lifestyle. Students learn principles of healthy eating and exercise while practicing physical and educational activities. They focus on scientific reasoning and teamwork while participating in active training missions targeting strength, endurance, coordination, balance, spatial awareness, and more.
This week’s Mission Question: How can you perform a physical activity that will improve your movement skills, coordination, and speed?
The answer: Agility Astro-Course!
Agility requires quickness, strength, good balance and coordination. Walking up and down stairs, hiking outdoors and playing tag are some daily activities that require agility. Improving agility allows you to rapidly change directions without the loss of speed, balance, or body control.
Astronauts practice strength and agility training before and after their space mission. There is a lot of focus on balance, coordination, and agility. Being in space for long periods of time can affect the astronaut’s ability to react to situations quickly. This is observed once the astronauts have returned to Earth. To help astronauts recover their agility after a mission, they run through an agility course that will test their quickness, reaction time, hand-eye coordination, and speed.
With the help of teachers and coaches, students participating in the Mission X fitness challenge, set-up a measured agility course. Moving as quickly as they can through the course, the students work to increase their speed and accuracy as they maneuver around the obstacles. To complete the mission, students record their times and observations in a Mission Journal, analyzing progress and drawing conclusions about their agility training.
Several participating teams of students have already completed the Agility Astro-Course training for the international challenge:
- The Kenyon PowerKids took their agility training to the slopes in Lackenhof, Austria where they maneuvered through the course on skis, noting that being bundled up and wearing helmets made them feel almost like real astronauts! > Read the blog post
- The Rain Forest X Team representing France imitated the jaguar, king of the deep forest, as they ran through the agility course improving their speed and coordination. > Read the blog post
- Team E.T. from Belgium were almost a blur as they improved their speed and performance on the Agility-Astro Course in the gymnasium. They proved that any kid can “train like an astronaut!” > Read the blog post
Visit the Mission X: International Fitness Challenge blog at http://trainlikeanastronaut.org/blog to read more about these amazing teams of students, as they work to achieve their challenge goal to “train like an astronaut!”
Resources:
Mission X: International Fitness Challenge website