Les Mills is committed to making people fall in love with fitness and having a positive impact on the quality of life of future generations. This is why the BORN TO MOVE® concept for children and youth was developed. The BORN TO MOVE classes are designed for different age levels that consider the specific needs of children and young people.
Our goal is for BORN TO MOVE to truly transform the lives of young people globally. For that to happen, we need to work together!
We spoke to Terese Larsson, the Principal at Backaskolan, and Annika Freundlich Hansson, Project Leader at Backaskolan about their work and inspiring the children to be more active and incorporating the BORN TO MOVE classes in their daily schedule.
“We at Backaskolan have always had a great interest in educating children in sports. The children are between the ages of 6-12 and we have 350 students in total, about 15 children per class. We heard about the Les Mills BORN TO MOVE concept and learned more about it from our contact at Les Mills Nordic.”
“We have scheduled BORN TO MOVE classes for short breaks for children that are about five minutes or so. We also have after-school activities for about 200 students where we use the BORN TO MOVE classes. We play the programs on screen virtually and the teacher follows the screen together with the students.”
Teachers at Backaskolan trying out BORN TO MOVE classes.
“When we started with the classes, we arranged a group of 5-6 teachers, whose mission was to introduce the concept to all the staff. There is a Les Mills App where we can find a variety of programs that we can choose from. We have our own BORN TO MOVE teacher group that chooses a program each week that the whole school does, so we do not take time trying to choose a program on every break. This system works really well. We will have a BORN TO MOVE class at least once a day on a break. We change the program every 2 weeks. It is good to repeat one program for 2 weeks so the children really learn it and then after a while, there is a new one. We are still testing if 2 or 3 weeks is a good timeframe. We want to make it easy to use for the teachers as well. The children really love it. At times you can see the shy ones at the back of the classroom and after a while, they are also jumping at the front. The programs are in English, so it is really great that they learn English at the same time. In Sweden, we start learning English already from age 6.”
“The after-school activities are held in a larger gymnastic hall. We are a community school, and we have 7 schools in the region. We are pioneers and then hopefully spread these fun classes to other schools. We really want to promote sports for children.”
“We had a national gymnastics day in Sweden where had also BORN TO MOVE classes at the school. We had all our 6-year-olds, and they all did a class together. The children were standing in a ring, which is a bit harder because you cannot copy the one in front for example and it was great to see how well they managed despite that.”
Students participating in a BORN TO MOVE class at Backaskolan during a break.
“Overall, we are continuing to increase our amount of exercise during the schooldays, and BORN TO MOVE® is an important part of this work. “