When Laura Fenn, fifth-grade school teacher and founder of The Walking Classroom, saw her students sitting in a classroom, parked behind a desk and unfocused on their schoolwork, she knew something had to be done.
The Walking Classroom is a nationwide program Fenn developed in response to the lack of opportunities students have during the school day for activity.
Fenn, concerned for her students and their lack of physical activity, led her students outside and gave them each a podcast.
“I loaded up some classroom sets for my students—educational podcasts, which I found on the Internet,” she said.
The rates of childhood obesity are growing larger by the day. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and tripled in adolescents in the past 30 years.
“The percentage of children aged 6–11 years in the United States who were obese increased from 7% in 1980 to nearly 18% in 2010,” according to the CDC website’s “Childhood Obesity Facts."
