It takes a village to raise kids who love to move and have the skills to be active for life.
Active for Life helps groups to promote physical literacy and physical activity by involving parents in their community.
This toolkit will be helpful anywhere children are active at the local level: recreation centres, community associations, local health and wellness groups, even libraries.
See our other toolkits
Collectively, we know more than ever about how children learn and develop. Active for Life collects and summarizes this evidence and present it in ways that parents can understand and put into practice.
Here’s what we’ve learned about what works best when communicating with parents:
- Use short, positive messages accompanied by images that help tell the story.
- Trickle out information regularly.
- Repeat messages to build understanding.
- Building relationships takes things beyond transactions and tasks and will help you to get things done. Use both face to face meetings and online platforms.
- Use a variety of channels to connect to the community: social media, newsletters (print and electronic), websites, posters and handouts, and so on.
Pick and choose from this list to help you engage the parents and families in your community. Explore our website to find even more.
Articles
If you are looking for engaging content for your website or newsletter, you are welcome to reprint any of the more than 1,000 Active for Life articles. We just ask that you follow our reuse guidelines. Here are some favourites.
- What exactly is physical literacy? This graphic makes it easy to understand.
- Sweat, step, sleep and sit: The new 24 hour guidelines
- The new 24 hour guidelines for early years
- Children with poor physical literacy struggle as adults
- Why teaching kids how to move has become essential
- 6 tips to help coaches teach parents about LTAD
- The mental health benefits of free play
- “As safe as necessary”: a new way of looking at risk
Curated lists of articles
Want to take a deeper dive into a particular topic? Our curated pages are lists of the best articles on specific sports, special topics, and information of interest to different communities and groups.
Tools
We’ve got materials that can help you educate parents about physical literacy. They include bookmarks and postcards you can order, posters you can download and print, presentations you can use (and slides you can use in your own presentations), and fun things like a quiz and a fortune teller you can download.
Activities and lesson plans
Ready to get kids moving and developing physical literacy? Here are some ideas for program leaders:
- Activities for kids and parents (1-12 years)
- Lesson plans (3-12 years)
- Lesson plan modules (3-12 years)
- Interactive lesson plan builder (3-12 years)
Sound bites and shareable graphics
You can use the memes on the following pages on your social media channels, web pages, newsletters, and anywhere else you think they’d work:
- Physical Literacy benefits kids
- Multi-sport activity benefits kids
- Keep kids in sport safe from abuse
Get social with Active for Life
Social media is a great way to build understanding in parents and to inspire them to add more movement into each day, for their kids and themselves.
Follow Active for Life on social media and enrich your social media channels by reposting and retweeting AfL content:
Using hashtags is a great way to connect your club members with the broader discussion. Consider using these:
- #physicalliteracy
- #activeforlife
- #sportsparents
- #qualitysport
- #LTAD
- #multisport
- #youthsports
Sign up for our monthly newsletter
Our monthly newsletter is written for parents who want to raise happy, healthy, active kids. Your parents may benefit from signing up. You might want to also.
Download our logo
Link to active for life by posting a logo on your site and introduce your users to the world of physical literacy.
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