When The Sky's the Limit

By Joelle Attinger/Boston

Life is like a room. You learn math, a door opens in your room. Now you can enter another room. Yet, I dislike rooms. I like to be free outside, and now I am. For the door to the sky was opened for me.

-- Drew Prairie, 10, Vista Grande School, Danville, Calif.

For grade schoolers all across the country, the sky has begun to poke its way into the classroom. At Boston's Josiah Quincy School, Pat Keohane's first- graders play an animated game of hangman, filling in seven blanks that form the word cumulus. In Pittsburgh local Meteorologist Brian Sussman creates mini-planetariums for fifth-graders by piercing the shape of the Big Dipper on the bottom of plastic cups. In a fifth-grade classroom at the Hillside School in Needham, Mass., students think up celestial similes: trees become the "roots of the sky"; sunlight is "butter pouring through a hole"; clouds are savored as "marshmallows." When children look skyward for lessons and inspiration, all sorts of wonderful things happen, says Keohane. "It makes them think, expand their vocabulary, gain confidence. And the best part is that it's free."

Using the sky as a focal point for education is the brainchild of a retired Boston newscaster, Jack Borden. Ten years ago, while hiking, Borden gazed up and felt the jolt of an epiphany. "I had never really noticed the sky before," he recalls, "and its beauty, majesty and fragility just overpowered me." Expose children to this great expanse, he reasoned, and you have a thematic catalyst that spans the three Rs, encompasses the arts and sciences and engages the mind in a voyage of self-discovery. Borden, now 59, decided to take his inspiration to local schools. By 1984 he had founded a nonprofit organization called For Spacious Skies and had begun publishing a 32-page guide for teachers, outlining ways in which the sky can stimulate learning. Since then, 17,000 copies have been scooped up, and "sky awareness" has entered curriculums in school districts from Lubbock, Texas, to Wausau, Wis.

Because the teaching guide is no more than a sketchy starting point, For Spacious Skies programs vary greatly from school to school. At suburban Hillside, for example, students listen to "sky music" ranging from Franz Josef Haydn's Sunrise Quartet to Tom Paxton's Even a Gray Day. In Pittsburgh's Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, Ruth Martin's fifth-graders write cloud-inspired haiku and use star charts to find constellations. The program seems to work as well in cities as in suburbia: Martin describes an eight- year-old "barely able to contain his excitement" at having spotted Jupiter above the urban skyline with his naked eye.

At the Harvard Graduate School of Education, researchers have tried to evaluate the impact of For Spacious Skies programs on elementary school students. Using specially developed tests, researchers concluded that the artistic, musical and literary skills of students exposed to the programs improved much faster than did those of nonparticipating youngsters. Skies students scored 37% higher in music appreciation, 13% higher in literary skills and 5% higher in sensitivity to art. "Something happened to these kids," marvels Market Researcher Anton Morton, who helped analyze the results. "They learned much more and grew much more."

At a time when there is a great deal of lamentation about the decline in writing skills among American children, the program seems to be a beacon of hope. "Children who respond to this write in a profound way," observes Miriam Kronish, the principal at Hillside. Best of all, "it's fun," says a Hillside fifth-grader and budding poet, Elizabeth Stone. "You can write what you want," she points out, and unlike too many other assignments, "you understand what you are writing about."