Thinking about Audiobooks/Walking Program

When I was a teenager, I participated each summer in a "Swim 50 Miles" program. We knew how many laps we had to swim to make a quarter mile, and we recorded the mile segments on a chart for everyone to see. There were no rewards for getting the 50 miles other than the joy of seeing we'd done it.I was just out walking while listening to one of our Playaway digital audiobooks (INKHEART, if you're curious) and wondering if I could get middle-schoolers interested in recording miles walked while listening to the books. I'd have to buy pedometers or find some community source to donate them. I wonder whether the phys. ed. department might have any -- I hadn't thought of them before now. Our rural/town district has a great childhood obesity problem, and I'm thinking I could offer the students who sign up for a "walking books" program first dibs on the audiobooks. We have 40 Playaways and plan to add more titles, but we have 650 seventh graders to whom I'd be offering the program. I'd probably have to offer some other award when they met a certain goal, but getting them started is on my mind first.Has anyone done anything like this? Do you have suggestions of ways we could do it without needing pedometers? (It's risky enough putting an audiobook in the hands of some of these kids, without handing them a pedometer along with it.)

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