As physical education teacher Linda Nelson leads a kindergarten class through a dance at Chelsea Elementary School (K-4) in Frankfort, she observes the range of abilities among her 5- and 6-year-old students. At one end of the spectrum is the alert, bright-eyed Mary, who doesn’t miss a cue: right foot forward, touch your head, jump and hop. At the other end is John, who doesn’t catch a cue. He spins right when the class spins left, claps offbeat, even wanders away from the group at one point. Guess which student excels in the classroom?
It’s no surprise to hear their classroom teacher report that Mary is her star pupil. “She’s right on track, always attentive,” says her teacher. John, on the other hand, is out to lunch, academically, most of the time. “He roams around the room and has poor fine and gross motor skills,” she says. “When he writes, his hand is like Jello.”
Parents and teachers in the trenches recognize this link between the gym and the classroom. But, what does it mean? More importantly, how can we use what we observe in the gym to improve classroom performance?
Enter Tom and Cathy Johnson, founders of Project First Step, Inc. Former high school teachers in physical education and English, respectively, this husband-and-wife team studies the physical-academic connection and advises teachers how to translate movement into academic success.
Nelson speaks for many P.E. teachers when she says, “They didn’t teach us this in school.” That is, unless you are a graduate of Albion College in Albion, Mich., where Tom Johnson is an assistant professor of physical education.
Doctors have long studied the relationship between children’s physical activity and mental skills. What makes Project First Step different from previous programs, says Johnson, is it applies a range of physical movements that enhance seven, fundamental, physical skills. In fact, “Let’s get physical” becomes a school-wide battle cry at Project First Step schools.
“Most earlier programs, such as Newell Kephart’s `perceptual motor skills’ in the ’60s and Jean Ayres’ `sensory integration’ in the ’70s, were skill- and task-specific,” says Johnson. “You took one child and worked on one skill. We believe children need a number of physical skills to succeed academically. Will mastering hopscotch make you a better reader? No. But combined with the other, basic physical skills, it will.”
The Johnsons train teachers to use a few simple tools, including a ball and pencil, to screen elementary-school children in the seven skills they consider the basics — balance, coordination, body image (being aware of your personal space), hand-eye coordination, laterality (knowing left from right, top from bottom, front from back), tactile touch and audio reception/expression (ability to hear and express sounds).
To test body image, for example, they ask a child to close his eyes, then touch his elbow, his hip, then touch a body part to another object (wrist to a table). They grade each child on each skill, from a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the most skilled.
When a child is lacking in one of these areas, he is usually having trouble learning an academic skill that corresponds to this physical skill. For example, the child with poor balance often has lousy penmanship too. A student with a poor body image cannot write between the lines. A child with a low laterality score mixes up “p” and “q” and “d” and “b.”
Few “normal” kindergartners children score 4 to 5 in each skill area, says Johnson. Most can use a booster shot in at least one skill.
“These are the kids — the 70 percent between the special needs and the gifted — that we developed Project First Step for — not just those at the low end,” he says. “We believe every child can score higher academically when the teachers incorporate movement. At first, some teachers say they want the kids to calm down before a lesson, not get them revved up. But after we show them how movement can help the kids get focused, they see it works.”
Since the Johnsons launched Project First Step in 1991, more than 50 schools in six states have signed one-year contracts. Most pay the $7,500 fee through their school budgets or by obtaining grants.
The yearlong training program includes four workshops for teachers, a seminar to teach the teachers how to screen children with the Project First Step method, monthly newsletters for teachers and parents with suggested activities, plus additional workshops as needed.
A Project First Step school also receives a list of schoolwide activities that require everyone to partake in a selected movement. One week, everyone skips down the hall (body image, coordination, laterality, balance). Another week, everyone speaks in rhyme (audio reception/expression).
The Johnsons also conduct separate screenings for children and workshops for parent and teacher groups. Johnson says they have screened 65,000 children in the United States, Canada and China.
The program’s greatest testimonial: Every school that has adopted the program has continued to implement it in-house or with additional help from the Johnsons.
Among the program’s happiest campers is Marilyn Martin, 1st-grade teacher at Farmington Elementary School in Garden City, Mich. “We started using Project First Step last year,” she says. “By the end of the year, we saw greater improvements in reading and math scores than we had for similar classes in previous years. And the screening helped us identify which kids needed additional vision screening or needed extra help in language development.”
Part of the teacher training includes Brain Research 101.
“Movement causes the brain to release the `good chemicals,’ including dopamine, epinephrine and serotonin,” Johnson explains. “Adults who get a runner’s high know this. These chemicals make you more alert and awake. So children are physically ready to learn. And they help counteract the `bad chemicals’ that cause stress, including norepinephrine and cortisol.”
The Johnsons use the term “physically illiterate” to describe today’s children. “They spend more time watching TV and playing video games and less time playing games that involve movement like jumping rope and hopscotch,” says Johnson. “They microwave food instead of spending time in the kitchen measuring and stirring. They no longer have physical chores that their parents or grandparents had. So many of them fail to learn basic physical skills that make them ready to learn and able to behave in a classroom.”
Some activities promoted by Project First Step are designed to get the whole classroom ready to learn in general. Others are geared toward specific academic functions. “Before you start a math lesson, for example, we suggest doing a physical sequencing activity such as `stand up, put a book on your head, turn around three times and sit down,'” says Johnson.
“You’ve heard people say that moving `gets your juices going,'” says Johnson. “Brain research shows this is true. Standing up to read your book report instead of sitting down actually increases the blood flow to your brain.”
Johnson also suggests child-specific activities. Case in point: Nelson asked Johnson to help with a 5-year-old Chelsea student she was tutoring. “He could not sit down and recite the alphabet,” reports Nelson. “So we tried putting him on a swing and having him say a letter after each swing: Swing, A, swing, B, swing, C. It worked; he could say the alphabet that way.”
Often, the child in question is the class clown.
“He’s the one who lacks balance or coordination so he falls off his chair or drops his pencil,” says Johnson. “Before you label him with attention deficit disorder and put him on Ritalin or discipline him for being disruptive, we believe in trying targeted movements to get him to move with purpose instead of just moving.”
Although Project First Step focuses primarily on kindergarten through 3rd grade, the teachers of higher grades employ it too. Ann Curran, Chelsea’s 4th-grade teacher, says she uses it to help during transitions — walking from lunch to recess, class to music and so on. “These are difficult for kids this age, but adding physical movements keeps them in order,” says Curran. “For example, we’ll all walk with our hands on our heads or have different tasks for our right and left hands.”
Tim Eastman began using Project First Step techniques in one of his advanced-placement biology classes for 11th and 12 graders at Hackett Catholic Central High School in Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1996. “Before tests or activities that required concentration, I gave the students specific, sequenced, physical activities,” says Eastman, who is a principal at an elementary school now. “What prompted us to try it was that parents told us kids did a better job at their homework if they worked out first.”
Eastman used the technique for one section of his biology classes and not for the other. “The class that did the exercises had better scores, especially in areas of writing where they had to concentrate on developing a topic,” he says.
The icing on the program’s cake, say teachers and school administrators, is the linking of physical and classroom teachers.
“P.E. and academics still work independently for the most part,” says Johnson. “But our program helps bridge the gap.”
After working in the gym and in the classroom, Eastman notes: “Good teachers do some of these things instinctively but don’t know why it works or only use bits and pieces. Project First Step helps them understand how it all ties it all together.”
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The Johnsons have written two books that explain their theories: “The 3 Rs: Physical, Emotional and Cognitive Readiness” and “Learn to Move, Move to Learn.” Both will be released in 2001. If you can’t wait that long to read up on the muscle-power/brain-power connection, here are a few books that elaborate:
“Teaching with the Brain in Mind,” by Eric Jensen (Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, $21.95). This recent primer on brain research is written primarily for teachers, but is also for parents. “Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head,” by Carla Hannaford (Great Ocean Publishers, $15.95). Written by a woman who didn’t learn to read until age 10, this is an easy overview of the body-brain connection.
“The Brain Encyclopedia,” by Carol Turkington (Facts on File, Inc., $40), is a good addition to the home library. Formatted like a dictionary, it gives simple explanations of brainy words, so you can learn the difference, for example, between “norepinephrine” and “epinephrine.”
Wonder what happens to children’s brains when they zone out on TV? Read “The Plug-in Drug/Television, Children and the Family,” by Marie Winn (Viking Press, $11.95).
