Exercise Incentive: Climbing an Imaginary Mountain

Over the last month, I have been walking my two older kids to school when weather allows and everyone is healthy.  The walk to school is a little over a mile, and we have to leave plenty early to make it to school in time given that my kids' pace is much slower than mine would be were I walking by myself.  Initially, my kids were complaining some as we were walking:  their legs were too tired, it's too far, we were going to fast, et cetera.  I know that they are capable of walking the mile to school.  We have done several 1-3 mile hikes with them, and they enjoy these hikes when they are busy exploring and having fun.  Unfortunately, we don't have time in the morning for them to stop and explore on the way to school, and furthermore, driveways, private yards and sidewalks don't tend to be conducive to exploring anyhow.  So I decided to try to come up with something to incentivize not only the morning walk to school, but other physical activity as well, and make it all a little more fun.  

​Since visiting Colorado this past summer and seeing the mountains, my kids have talked about being mountain climbers.  I decided to base this project on that interest.  I painted a mountain on some scrap cardboard, printed out some little hiker images to represent my kids, and had their hiker/climber representations "hike/climb" to the top of the mountain as my kids completed walking miles or other physical activity that I deemed worthy of moving a "mile" up the mountain.  We agreed that the kids would receive a certificate for reaching mid-way ("base camp") on the mountain, and a medal for reaching the top.  The project has been a hit with the kids, and they have even been asking me to take them out walking and biking so they can move up the mountain.  Here's more detail on what we did with this project:

Painted a mountain on cardboard and named it

• My kids decided that wanted the mountain to also be a very active volcano.  It might not be realistic to summit a volcano which is actively spewing hot lava, but since this is their mountain, childhood is about imagination, and I want them to be excited about climbing their mountain, we have an active volcano mountain.
• We had some large pieces of cardboard left over from a recent purchase, so I cut some to fit a space on the wall in our unfinished basement, searched online for how to draw a simple mountain (drawing is not something I consider myself to be a natural at so this was not intuitive to me), mixed together some of our bottles of tempera paint and went at it.
• After much deliberation, the kids agreed upon naming their mountain Horsey Monkey Mound Mountain.

Created printable hikers to represent my kids as they climbed the mountain

• I have several clipart files that I have downloaded from various Etsy stores, and for this project I used this camping clipart from the store Prettygrafikdesign, which had an image of a hiker with a backpack.  There is a wealth of camping, hiking and mountain clipart on Etsy to choose from, but I already had this, and it suited my purposes just fine.
• I used image editing software to customize the hiker to better represent my kids.  I use GIMP because it is free - I can't afford Adobe for just doing some simple editing, nor do I like their current cloud-based, plan-based business model.  (I also used GIMP to create the summit sign image at the top of this blog post.  There are plenty of GIMP tutorial videos on YouTube detailing how do techniques like creating the wood burn look that I used in that image.)
• After printing and cutting out the hikers, I laminated them.  My laminator is one of my favorite tools at home, and we use it frequently.  When cutting the hikers from the laminate, I left a little tag of laminate at the top to use for pinning the hikers to the cardboard mountain with push pins.

Added images for a trail head, mile markers and base camp to the mountain

• The kids and I agreed that the path to the mountain peak would be 20 miles long, with a base camp at mile 10.
• I again used the aforementioned camping clipart from the Etsy store Prettygrafikdesign to create my mile markers and to print some base camp images.  For the trail head sign and base camp sign as well as the summit sign at the beginning of this post, I began with these wood sign images I had previously purchased from the Etsy store AlphabetsStore.  I used MS PowerPoint to create these final images since I wasn't really doing much editing, but rather just adding some text.

Created a certificate for reaching base camp at the mid-way point

• I again used clip art I had purchased from Etsy shops for creating the base camp certificates in MS PowerPoint.  Since these certificates were for kids, I wanted a bit of a whimsical look rather than professional.  I used one of these digital frames from PaulaKimStudio, and a volcano image from PassionPNGcreation - both of these images were black and white, but I utilized GIMP to add color for my project.  I have quite a list of fonts that I have downloaded free from various "free font" websites, and I found a few that I thought went well together for the theme of this certificate: Cinnamon Cake, Risque, and Juice ITC.
• I also laminated the certificates because I knew that an non-laminated piece of paper would quickly be destroyed in the hands of my children, either intentionally or unintentionally.

Created medals for reaching the mountain peak

• For the medals, I decided to use canning jar lid inserts (luckily a friend had some she no longer needed and gave them to me for free, though I discovered I can buy the inserts separately at the local grocery store) and some white ribbon left over from a package I'd received in years past (I have a stash of bits of acquired ribbon that come in handy for little projects like this).   We drilled some holes in the jar lids; I sewed the ribbon together in a "V" shape, mimicking a medal we already had on hand; and I used wire from my jewelry craft supplies to make some jump rings for attaching the ribbon to the lid.  I sewed one of the jump rings into the ribbon, again modeling the medal we already had.
• To decorate the medal for this particular project, I created a design in MS PowerPoint, printed it on sticker paper, cut it out with my 2-inch circle punch, and just stuck it on the jar lid.   I used the same volcano image I'd used on the base camp certificates (see above), and used Trees TFB font to add some tree images into the lettering.
• I also printed out stickers for the backs of the medals which have my kids' names and the date on which they summited the mountain.

All in all, I'm very pleased with this project.  The kids had fun with it, I had fun creating it, and it fulfilled its purpose of encouraging more movement and making the process enjoyable.   Now, Hopper 1 is telling me he wants me to create a bug mound for our next exercise incentive project...hmmm, the mental wheels are turning....