-Educating the Whole Child

Educating the Whole Child and Creating Life Long Learners - The Juggling for Success program emphasizes students' emotional, psychological, and physical health needs, and it reinforces academic success. It works with children at their level and helps them to take steps to be successful in achieving dozens of very specific performance outcomes which can be assessed unequivocally - either you can perform a certain skill or you cannot yet perform it. If you cannot yet perform that skill you know from previous experience in the program that if you go step by step and persevere, you will eventually succeed.

The success of this program will be enhanced if you implement it as part of a positive learning climate and an interactive cross age tutoring environment. Teachers work with children to help them to respect and work well with others and to become life long learners. This program leads automatically to community involvement. One outcome may be that your students go to other schools to perform and to teach. They may go to places like the Rotary club and senior centers as well. At Hazel Dell and other schools with long-standing programs, academic outcomes are stressed by teachers. However these outcomes are generally regarded as anecdotal because the whole school juggles and there is no "control group." However teachers continually claim that there are significant academic benefits to juggling which they report in qualitative terms.

Juggling as Developmentally Appropriate Physical Education - This program has been designed to fulfill the rigorous guidelines of the Council on Physical Education for Children (COPEC) and the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) by insuring that the Juggling for Success program is developmentally appropriate for all children. It includes cognitive, motor, affective and fitness goals for every grade level from kindergarten through middle school. It gives teachers an opportunity to provide frequent and meaningful age-appropriate opportunities for children to develop a functional understanding of body awareness, spatial awareness, effort and it's relationship to achievement, rhythm and expression.

Psycho-social Impact - A Juggling for Success Program helps to build confidence and competence in locomotor and manipulative skills in all children. It accommodates all students, regardless of gender, size, age, physical skill, fitness, developmental status, or previous movement experience. Students learn how to learn step by step. They learn to feel good about self-improvement and they learn to seek personal challenges. Implemented properly, a Juggling for Success Program can profoundly affect school culture, discipline and academic achievement. Because of the open-ended nature of juggling and the dual artistic and athletic nature of the art/sport, students can adopt juggling and the related "circus" arts as a lifetime physical activity. It is not at all unusual for a student to start with juggling and to develop interest in unicycling, pantomime, stilt walking, acrobatics, the Frisbee®or Hacky Sack® or similar non-competitive manipulative or performance based skills.