Family Time Fitness

Family Time Fitness is a K-12 physical education curriculum delivered through a digital subscription with more than 260 lesson plans and accompanying video demonstrations. It occupies a niche most homeschool families think about only when a state reporting form asks whether they have a PE curriculum, and then find themselves surprised that something reasonably turnkey exists at all.

Last updated: 2026-04-24 · Every Homeschool Editorial Team

At a glance

Method	Subject-specialist (video-demonstrated physical education)
Worldview	Secular (faith-neutral)
Grades	PreK through 12 (core program weighted K-8)
Formats	Digital (video lessons, printable activity cards, PDFs)
Cost tier	Budget
Parent intensity	3 (parent supervises and participates)
ESA-common	Yes (typically eligible as PE coverage)
Accredited	No (materials only)
Established	Company founded circa 2010
Website	familytimefitness.com

Our scoreboard (1-5)

Criterion	Score	One-line reason
Academic rigor	3	Appropriate for PE; not a kinesiology or health-science course
Ease of teaching	4	Video-demonstrated lessons; minimal prep required
Content quality	4	Covers motor skills, fitness, sports skills, and health concepts at grade-appropriate depth
Flexibility	5	Lessons can be taken in any order; 45-minute daily format is adjustable
Value for money	4	Annual subscription in the tens of dollars rather than hundreds
Worldview scope	5	Secular PE with no worldview content to negotiate
Visual/design	3	Video production is functional; activity cards are clean and usable
Support resources	3	Printable assessments, certificates, and extension activities; no live instructor

Who the publisher is

Family Time Fitness was founded by Jeremiah Knopp, a certified fitness trainer and nutritionist, when his brother Darren began homeschooling and discovered there was no straightforward PE curriculum on the market. Jeremiah partnered with health and wellness specialist Dr. Peter Minke and with Mike Hanik, a kinesiology faculty member at Texas A&M and a youth fitness specialist, to develop the core curriculum. The company launched around 2010 and has operated as a small, family-held homeschool publisher since.

The company's core offering is the Fitness 4 Homeschool program, a digital subscription providing roughly 260 daily lesson plans, video demonstrations of each activity, printable activity cards, warm-up and cool-down routines, and assessment forms. The program is marketed as meeting typical state PE requirements for homeschool reporting, and families who complete the daily 45-minute routine across a school year will generally have produced a body of work that satisfies most state documentation standards.

The publisher positions itself as faith-neutral. There is no religious content in the curriculum, no opening prayer in the video segments, no worldview framing around the body or health. Families of every worldview use the program without adaptation. This is unusual enough in homeschool publishing that it is worth naming explicitly: Family Time Fitness is structurally agnostic, and that is a deliberate design choice by the founders.

The core pedagogy

The program's pedagogical premise is that a homeschool parent with a living room, a driveway, or a small backyard can deliver a reasonable elementary and middle school PE course if given a scripted lesson plan, a video of what the activity looks like, and a short list of supplies. The supplies are minimal: a playground ball, a jump rope, chalk, painter's tape on the floor, a beanbag, a hula hoop. Most lessons use equipment a family already owns or can acquire for under fifty dollars total.

The daily lesson is structured in predictable segments: a short warm-up, a fitness-focused activity (cardio, strength, flexibility), a motor-skill or sports-skill activity (throwing, catching, dribbling, jumping), a cool-down, and an optional extension or assessment. Total active time is roughly 30-45 minutes depending on the grade level and the family's pacing. The curriculum spans 260 lessons, which at one per school day is a full year; a family running PE three days a week stretches the same material across two school years.

Signature mechanics: (1) Video demonstration per activity. Every activity in the curriculum has a short demonstration video, one of the founders or an instructor performs the movement with clear verbal cues. This solves the single hardest problem in homeschool PE, which is that most parents do not know what a "star jump" or a "grapevine" looks like and cannot demonstrate it from a printed description. (2) Minimal equipment requirement. A family without gym access can run the entire curriculum. Lessons are designed for indoor-space constraints as well as outdoor. (3) Printable activity cards. Each lesson's activities are available as printable cards, useful for a parent running a co-op class or a family with multiple children in different grades. (4) Assessment forms. Fitness and skills assessments are included and can be used for state reporting or for family-internal progress tracking.

A day in the life

A second grader using Family Time Fitness runs the daily lesson after lunch. The parent pulls up today's lesson, say, Lesson 47, on a tablet. Five minutes of warm-up (jumping jacks, arm circles, shoulder rolls) with the video playing. Ten minutes of a fitness-focused activity (an obstacle course assembled in the living room using a jump rope as a start line and couch cushions as jump hurdles). Ten minutes of a skill-based activity (underhand throwing drills with a playground ball, rotating between two children and a parent). Five minutes of cool-down stretching. The assessment card is filled in weekly, not daily. Total clock time: thirty-five minutes. The parent participates alongside the child, the program assumes adult participation, which doubles as the adult's own movement for the day.

At the upper elementary and middle school level the same structure extends with longer activities, more explicit sports skills (dribbling, volleyball bumps, basketball shooting form), and more rigorous fitness components. A sixth grader running the program invests the full forty-five minutes and often elects to combine Family Time Fitness with an outside sport or activity that supplies the competitive and team component the home program cannot.

What they do exceptionally well

Fills the PE slot without drama. The single largest benefit of Family Time Fitness is that it removes the PE question from a homeschool family's to-do list. A family running the daily lesson satisfies typical state expectations for physical education documentation, produces weekly and monthly records, and ends the year with assessments and a certificate suitable for any portfolio review. For families who want to say "yes, we did PE" and move on, the program is turnkey.

Parent-friendly video. The demonstration videos solve the recurring problem of a non-athletic parent trying to teach a motor skill they themselves cannot perform. The video performs the skill; the parent supervises and participates. This is a better model for elementary-age PE than most school-based programs, which rely on a teacher demonstrating at the front of the gym, a parent with two children in the living room cannot replicate that setup.

Cost structure. The annual subscription retails at approximately $57-$100 depending on promotional pricing as of April 2026, with occasional multi-year bundles available. A family running the program for one year and then re-using printed activity cards over subsequent years amortizes the cost across multiple grades. Compared to the hundreds-of-dollars price tag of a full textbook-based PE health curriculum, Family Time Fitness is the clear budget option.

Worldview-neutral content. The curriculum is free of religious framing, free of political framing around body image or health ideology, and free of any integration with a broader worldview program. Families who want PE to be PE, movement, fitness, motor skill, find exactly that.

What they do poorly

Not a health science course. Family Time Fitness is a PE curriculum. It is not a health curriculum, not a nutrition curriculum, not an anatomy-and-physiology introduction, not a substance-abuse-prevention program. Families needing to satisfy a state health-education requirement separate from PE will need a companion resource. This is not unusual for homeschool PE programs but is worth flagging.

Video production is older. The video library was produced across multiple production runs over the program's decade-plus history, and some segments show their production age. Audio quality varies. Families accustomed to the polish of a modern streaming fitness app will find Family Time Fitness looks homemade. The content is accurate and instructional; the packaging is not 2026 production-studio grade.

No live instruction or community component. The program is pre-recorded video and printable materials. There is no live class, no instructor office hours, no student-to-student interaction, no sports-team structure. Families seeking the social component of PE, team play, competition, instructor feedback, must source it separately, typically through a co-op sports league, a Classical Conversations community, a YMCA youth program, or a local parks-and-recreation league.

Sports-skill depth is limited. A student who completes Family Time Fitness for eight grades has moved through motor-skill fundamentals, general fitness, and introductory sports skills, but is not a trained athlete in any specific sport. Families with a competitive-sport aspiration for their student will not find Family Time Fitness sufficient on its own and should plan to combine the home program with sport-specific coaching.

Who it fits / who it doesn't

• Pick Family Time Fitness if: you need to satisfy a state PE documentation requirement without designing a program yourself; you want a low-cost subscription that covers multiple years; you have a small indoor or outdoor space and cannot or do not want to join a gym; you want a secular, worldview-neutral fitness program; you want video demonstrations because you do not want to teach the physical skills yourself.

• Skip Family Time Fitness if: your child is a serious competitive athlete who needs sport-specific coaching; you want a health-and-wellness course that integrates nutrition, anatomy, and health education alongside fitness; you want live instruction or a cohort experience; you have access to a strong local co-op, sports league, or homeschool athletic association that already covers PE; your state requires a formal health credit that PE alone does not satisfy.

Cost honest assessment

The Family Time Fitness annual web-access subscription retails at approximately $57-$100 depending on promotional window as of April 2026, with occasional multi-year discounts available. A five-year-access bundle, for families with multiple children who will use the program over several years, typically reduces the per-year cost further. The publisher claims the content would cost approximately $1,800 if purchased as separate pieces; this is a marketing number rather than a comparable alternative.

Compared to The Homegrown Preschooler PE add-ons (subject-specific and shorter-scope), Christian Light Education health/PE (full textbook program at approximately $40-$60 per grade), and Homeschool PE by Coach Terry Lynch (similar digital subscription model), Family Time Fitness sits at the budget end of the category. For a family with multiple children spanning PreK through middle school, it is the lowest-cost complete PE solution on the market by a reasonable margin.

A realistic all-in for one year of PE for a K-8 family running Family Time Fitness runs $57-$100 for the subscription plus roughly $20-$50 for basic equipment (balls, jump ropes, beanbags, cones).

ESA eligibility notes

Family Time Fitness is a secular PE curriculum, which simplifies ESA eligibility. Most state ESA programs cover PE as a qualifying expense, and Family Time Fitness has appeared on ClassWallet vendor lists in several states including Arizona, Utah, and West Virginia. The publisher's secular framing avoids the religious-content restrictions that complicate purchase of Christian curricula under certain state rules. Families should verify Family Time Fitness appears on their specific state marketplace or should purchase through an already-approved retailer and submit for reimbursement. For families whose state program does not explicitly cover physical education, Family Time Fitness is typically reimbursable under broader "curriculum and educational materials" categories.

Alternatives

• Homeschool PE (Coach Terry Lynch), a family would pick Homeschool PE over Family Time Fitness for a more sports-skill-focused program built around structured weekly skill development rather than daily 45-minute lesson plans.
• The Good and the Beautiful Health and Safety, a family would pick The Good and the Beautiful Health and Safety over Family Time Fitness to combine a health-education component with PE framing, at the cost of adopting the publisher's broader worldview approach.
• Local YMCA or parks-and-recreation league, a family would pick a local YMCA youth program over Family Time Fitness for live instruction, team play, and a cohort experience the home program cannot provide, at a higher cost and with scheduling commitments the digital subscription does not require.

How we verified this

Our editorial team reviewed the Family Time Fitness homepage, the Fitness 4 Homeschool product page, and the company About page in April 2026. We cross-referenced against the Homeschool.com resource guide listing, independent review coverage, and the Rainbow Resource catalog listing for the publisher's products. Pricing retrieved from the publisher in April 2026.