Let's Move! provides the ideal opportunity to attract grandparents and grandchildren into your health or wellness center or program by providing participants with shared experiences and multidimensional health benefits, depending on the programs offered. To embrace this opportunity, you may want to incorporate the intergenerational activities below into your programming, or use them as a springboard for other ideas.

1. Walking the World

Start this walking program by describing the reasons why walking is good for health and how to make walking workouts enjoyable. Create an adventure for grandparents and grandchildren by making the goal to circle the globe. Ask participants to count their steps with pedometers and to write down their results. Pin a map on the wall to track progress, and count each step towards mileage. Recognize efforts by enrolling grandparents and grandchildren in the President's Challenge.

2. Family Album

Invite grandparents to bring photographs from the family album. Encourage them to use these images to talk about the past, allowing grandchildren to ask questions and discover more about their grandparents. Introduce an extra level to this program by suggesting that grandparents help grandchildren begin a photo album of their own.

3. Scavenger Hunt

Create a list of small things for grandparents and grandchildren to search for on a walk. Include items appropriate to your environment, e.g. a paper clip, a leaf, a white stone. Count the number of scavenged items each pair has at the end of the walk. Let the pair with the most things choose the next adventure.

4. Book-lovers Club

Ask grandparents and grandchildren to read books together, with the goal of discussing them at monthly Book Lovers meetings. Encourage participants to discuss the books they've read with other members of the club. Prepare for an enthusiastic exchange between book lovers, young and old.

5. Group Exercise

Make group exercise opportunities for the whole family. Offer classes in tai chi, swimming, yoga or group fitness, for example. Give dance classes for families. Come up with dances and name them after families participating in the program. Consider having family nights a few times a week.

6. Life Stage

Start a theater group to offer creative fun for grandparents and grandchildren. Ask the participants to write, produce and direct a year-end play for the theater group to perform. Urge them to come up with an active, fun play. Invite family members to the performance.

7. Tennis for Two

Offer tennis classes for grandparents and grandchildren at a special intergenerational rate. At the season's end, organize a tennis tournament in which participants play other intergenerational pairs. Suggest that grandparents and grandchildren invite other family members to watch or join in the fun. Provide fun awards to program participants, and be creative when coming up with award categories. When the tournament ends, throw a party to recruit other family members for the upcoming season.

8. PC Pals

Provide intergenerational computer classes, which allow grandchildren to help grandparents learn basic computer knowledge. Encourage family groups to use the computer to communicate.

9. Family Play

Devise activities that provide all family members with opportunities to work out together, e.g. outdoor hikes, biking or walking trips, or sports days. Host a family Olympics, with fun events and categories for all family members. Ensure that activities are accessible for all participants.

10. The Learning Files

Help grandparents share their skills and talents with younger family members by giving them opportunities to teach grandchildren - even if they are learning a topic themselves. Make lesson plans fun and easy. Give tomorrow's plan to grandparents, so they can prepare to teach grandchildren about subjects such as meal planning, reading food labels, or choosing the right footwear for an activity.

Relationships with grandchildren bring love, energy, play and purpose into the lives of older adults. In return, children benefit from the attention, maturity, knowledge and love of their grandparents, many of whom are caring and thoughtful role models. By creating programs that bring together these family members, you can provide individuals with healthier futures and valued life experiences, while improving your bottom line.

Generous partners sometimes underwrite sophisticated marketing campaigns, reaching target audiences with carefully honed messages about health and wellness. But without such resources, proponents of physical activity must find other ways of getting the point across. This is the intersection of advocacy, strategy and ingenuity.

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) uses a special-event strategy that I'll paraphrase as "taking the show to the audience." The idea, in short, is to piggyback on a gathering that is already being planned and promoted in its own right. This eases the burden of creating an event out of whole cloth and taking on all the responsibility for planning, promoting and paying for it as a forum for your announcement. An important bonus is the added momentum such leverage lends to both events.

Savvy leaders of nonprofits use a similar strategy to communicate key points. Examples abound of campaigns relying on partner organizations' use of existing communication channels to pass along message points. Traditionally, this has meant passing on articles and online links. More recently, the headlong momentum of social media means that posts, "likes" and retweets can propel an idea faster than you can say, "Please share this."

A related notion flips the reality that, for many families, mothers are the gatekeepers of family health information. While this is quite true (and central to many programs that target women to promote family health and wellness), another strategy reaches families at their point of connection with important programs and institutions - schools.

I saw this at work recently at Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, DC. Capital City has a culture of wellness that infuses the curriculum. Students at all levels pursue age-appropriate physical activity - from in-class learning to after-school sports and field trips - guided by fitness teachers, parents and guests. Beginning in first grade, students learn about bodily systems and nutrition. The dedication to holistic fitness and wellness helped earn Capital City Public Charter School the distinction of being selected to receive the first Live Positively fitness center award by the National Foundation for Governor's Fitness Councils, chaired by Jake Steinfeld and in partnership with ACSM.

Capital City's health-and-fitness culture extends beyond students, faculty and staff. By design, those messages reach whole families. Youngsters naturally bring home and share what they learn. Beyond that, the school has after-hours programming aimed at parents and siblings. This approach clearly works, at least for this diverse urban community. And I believe it can be equally successful throughout the country.

How can your organization use established programs to convey messages about physical activity?

What communication vehicles already in use could reach target audiences with health-and-fitness information?

Written by David Geier MD, AOSSM Public Relations Chair

For a number of reasons, physical education programs in U.S. schools seem to be in a state of decline. In the current economic climate, government funding for education programs has decreased, so physical education programs have often been cut. Also, with schools needing to demonstrate success academically, teachers and administrators frequently worry about any activity that pulls students out of the classroom.

But do physical education classes really hinder a student's academic performance? It has been suggested that physically fit children are not only healthier, but they perform better on standardized academic tests.

A novel approach

Mitchell Elementary School, an underprivileged school in Charleston, South Carolina wanted to be proactive and find a way to maintain academic performance without sacrificing physical activity.Their school nurse, Glennis Randazzo, applied for grants that would fund education and equipment through the PE4Life program. The school partnered with physicians at the Medical University of South Carolina to study the success of the program. Dr. Carly Scahill, a pediatrics resident at MUSC and one of the study's lead authors, was also involved in the program. Prior to implementation of the new program, students underwent 40 minutes of physical education class per week. It increased to 40 minutes, five days per week under the new program, with the goal of combining physical activity and intellectual stimulation.

Stressing both physical and mental exercise

The younger children performed developmentally appropriate activities during the program, like riding scooters while being asked to trace shapes with their movement. Older children performed more active and intellectually challenging activities like practicing multiplication while climbing a rock wall. For example, if a student's left foot was on a "two" and left hand was on a "four," then he would reach his hand to number eight.

Academic results

Schools administer the Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) test each fall. Prior to the new physical exercise program, only 55% of students achieved their spring test goals. After a year in the program, 68.5% of students met their goals.

Next steps

Increased time for physical activity doesn't have to mean less time to learn; it's just learning in a new format. So what is next? Do we wait and hope that more schools try it? Dr. Scahill wants to expand the scope of the study, matching two schools based on demographics and academic performance and seeing if a school that utilizes the program would outscore the ones that did not. More longitudinal data would also be helpful to determine if these programs apply to students at all levels.

What are your thoughts on the program? Can PE help improve test scores?