It’s Walk to School Week 2015

It’s  Walk to School Week 2015

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.

Aristotle

Walking is man's best medicine.

Hippocrates

Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.

Thomas Jefferson

If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish. 
 Charles Dickens

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking. 
Friedrich Nietzsche

The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. Mark Twain

Walk to School Week, running from 18^th May to 22^nd May 2015, is now in its 20^th year and reaches over 13m British people, making it one of the UK’s leading behaviour change campaigns for children. If your school is not already involved, or has become a little complacent in promoting the message, take a moment to ponder what you could be doing to encourage your pupils to adopt a walking habit to last a long and healthy lifetime. Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson had the right idea.

Take a look at the Living Streets website for a host of ideas to whip up some enthusiasm and get your pupils (and their parents) walking to school, this week….and next week…and the week after. The main drive behind the campaign, is the health benefits to be reaped from regular walking: who would disagree with Hippocrates? But walking offers so much more than a chance for kids to rack up some of their 60 minutes per day exercise quota.

It relieves stress and frees the mind to think, to learn and to create: Nietzsche and Dickens would seem to concur, and who are we to disagree? It promotes the physical health, not only of those walking, but also of this wonderful world in which we live. It is free. It is a fantastically sociable activity when partaken in company: take a leaf out of Mark Twain’s book, so to speak. It is outside which, even if for just a short while each day, is a great place for us all (but especially our children) to be.

We, at the Learning Escape, invite you to read our whitepaper “The Outdoor Environment” based upon the research of Michael Louv who coined the phrase nature deficit disorder and spawned an international movement to reconnect children with nature.

How can our kids really understand the moral complexities of being alive if they are not allowed to engage in those complexities outdoors?

Richard Louv