Through juggling to language arts

By Bill Stone Queens, NY

How was I to keep my special education students at P.S. 91 in Queens, N.Y., interested in language arts? I decided to teach them to juggle!

I was looking for something to do with my class that would maintain their attention span and be fun. I had taught myself to juggle in a couple of hours, and one day demonstrated to them the steps to learning as a lesson in sequence. They immediately asked if I would teach them how to do it. "Why not?" I thought.

I developed and wrote up a program of juggling instruction called "Juggling, A New Approach to the Language Arts" which entails reading, writing, motor coordination and performing arts.

It was selected for a grant from Impact II (spon­sored by the Board of Education and the Exxon Education Foundation) to be developed into a curriculum for other teachers if they choose to use it.

I broke the three ball cascade down into individual leaming steps (the drop, the toss, the three bag practice, the exchange, the three bag practice no. 2, the first jug and the juggle), listing purpose and goal for each step.

Students undertook each step in sequence. After learning to do what was outlined, they had to write a homework paper describing the step in their own words, including a description of their feelings and the problems they encountered. .

Each paper was dictated the next day in class and written on the blackboard. l led class discussion about sentence structure, vocabulary and grammar. The story was edited, corrected and rewritten properly. Each completed story was then put into a folder. At the end of the program, we held a book-binding lesson and each child took home a personal diary of his or her juggling experience. It included art work they had done about juggling.

We held discussions about their problems with mastering each step. This gave them a chance to share their feelings of frustration and accomplishment. It showed them that mistakes were permissable and that sharing experiences is a good way to learn.

The children were anxious to learn each step, and the process became an effective classroom management technique. I held the juggling session toward the end of the day, and permitted it only if the rest of the day's planned work load had been done.

The program finale was a class performance at "The Special Arts Festival," held at Columbia University. The most satisfying finale for me personally, however, was the class performance on the city-wide reading test --a minimal jump of 2.5 years in each student's score!