Causes

Education Health & nutrition Youth development

Posted by

Debra I.

Executive Director

Our mission

The mission of The Walking Classroom is to provide teachers with an easy-to-use resource to help America's children establish and maintain healthy lifestyle habits while building their health literacy and core content knowledge. Students walk, listen and learn.

What we do

The Walking Classroom is an award-winning, nationally recognized educational / health program that provides teachers with class sets of all-in-one audio devices ("WalkKits") that are pre-loaded with a year's worth of educational podcasts. Each podcast lasts about 15 minutes, and all are supported with extensive lesson plans that include the standards covered, discussion questions, and comprehension quizzes. The podcasts are custom written and align with the newly implemented English Language Arts Common Core State Standards. Many teachers are intimidated by these new standards, so our program provides teachers with thoroughly-researched material that they are responsible for teaching their students, but in which they might not have strong content knowledge.

The Walking Classroom also enables teachers to provide differentiated learning opportunities for their students, as not all students are successful sitting behind a desk all day. By getting up and walking while listening to educational content, The Walking Classroom benefits students that are kinesthetic and / or audio learners.

Each WalkKit is $125 and Teacher's Guide is $150, so a classroom set of 25 would be $3,275. If a school can purchase the materials outright, we ship them the next day and all is well. Although the WalkKits can be shared among classrooms and reused year after year, we recognize that the price may be out of range for many schools. Therefore, on our website we have an area where teachers can apply for a donated set of materials (we currently have over 250 teachers from around the country asking for materials, and we've done minimal outreach). The Walking Classroom then seeks donations and foundation grants so that schools that want the materials can be sponsored by various funders. While initially, our growth was propelled by private foundation grant funding, our largest source of funds now is net income from sales of WalkKits and Teacher's Guides.