NAVIGATING THE WEB by Sheri Mankal |
Excercise and Fitness at www.bodybreak.com With summer just around the comer, exercise and fitness are on almost everyone's mind. Here's a website that fits in nicely with these thoughts. It's the Body Break website and it can be found at www.bodybreak.com. This site is based on the television show and although it is a commercial site, unless you go into the store there is no mention of selling. This site is very useful as it covers numerous topics including Nutrition, Exercise, Fitness and Recipes. All of the RECIPES are easy to follow and nutritious. There is a quiz on nutrition that is presented in a true or false format. You read a short statement and then click on the True or False icon. There are never any wrong answers as only the correct answer appears in a short paragraph or two with lots of nutritional information. You would only want to use the quiz portion of this site with your higher students as the nutritional vocabulary could prove to be too challenging for the lower level students. For the lower level students, there are videos you can watch in the BEHIND THE SCENES portion of the website. And most of the information offered in the rest of the site is easy and short enough for most students to read comfortably. In the EXERCISE portion of this site, you can learn about the benefits of walking. You are shown what your target heart rate should be as well as how to monitor it during physical activity. At the Speed Factory you can learn how to develop speed. There is a great chart available under the Walking Section that could be read on the computer or printed out and used as a tool in the regular classroom. This chart is an example of a walking program that takes a beginner from walking 15 minutes a week to 40 minutes a week in a very safe manner. You could even have your students produce their charts and track their exercise progress in a similar manner. On the NUTRITION pages, you can learn how to maximize your Energy, Safe Ways to Diet, Special Nutrition Tips for Sports and Meet Jennifer Andrew, RD, the Body Break Dietitian. Again, some of the terms used in the Nutrition pages are difficult due to their nature, but there is still a lot of very valuable and easy to read information to make this site well worth while. My favorite portion of the Nutrition pages is the TIPS OF THE MONTH section. In this section, there are 3 or 4 nutritional tips offered for each month. Each tip is one or two sentences long making them very user friendly for literacy students. Because these tips are organized by date it is very easy to create a "Treasure Hunt" type quiz for your students, which helps them learn the nutritional information while at the same time getting use to searching for information on the Internet. The FITNESS TIPS section offers very practical ideas on how to make exercise fun, easy and a regular part of your routine. There are eight sections to the FITNESS TIPS page and you could easily make questions for your students to answer based on these short, clear sentences. Or, if you had higher level students, you could have them read the information in one of the sections and create a short quiz for their classmates to answer. At the end of the FITNESS TIPS, there is a wonderful, inspirational poem entitled The Man Who Thinks He Can! I highly recommend you check it out for yourself and I'm sure you'll want to share it with all of your students and colleagues. It's the kind of inspiration we all need from time to time. With the wonderful wealth of information offered at a site like this, the possibilities are endless! I hope you take the opportunity to check out the Body Break website soon. Good Luck and Good Health! |