Math, the Arts, Science Studies Benefit; Self-Esteem Is Raised : Things Are Looking Up for Students in ‘For Spacious Skies’ Programs

It was a blustery New England morning, with a cutting wind blowing off Boston Harbor. People were staying inside if they could, but Pat Keohane and her first-graders were up on the school roof again, looking at the pale winter sky.

“What’s moving the clouds?” she asked, pointing at a bank of cumuli.

“The wind,” replied the kids in an enthusiastic chorus.

“There’s light blue, and dark blue and baby blue over there,” said a little girl, her scarf flapping as she stared intently at the heavens.

The boy next to her interrupted: “There’s a swordfish with a long nose.” His comments were suddenly lost in a babble of other kids’ voices.

“Look, those clouds look like a sweatsuit,” said one.

“I see an upside-down dragon,” another giggled.

Back at their desks later, the children took turns spelling sky-related words in a variation of the classic hangman game, doing well on big ones like “lightning,” and “showers.”

Dry Spell

A diminutive boy spelled “rain,” and Keohane asked: “What would happen if we didn’t have rain for 100 days?”

“There would be no flowers and no wildlife,” one of the pupils piped up.

“That wouldn’t matter,” said another. “We’d still have water in the sinks.”

In Keohane’s inner-city classroom at the Josiah Quincy School and at about 1,400 others across the country, teachers say that a program called “For Spacious Skies” is helping pupils academically and emotionally.

Some of those involved with the program go even further, suggesting that sky watching can turn tough inner-city kids away from drugs and desperation and onto aesthetic beauty instead.

Jack Borden, originator of the program, says, “Wherever you are you have the sky, whether you are living in the high mountains or the worst of slums. As a matter of fact, the person living in the worst slums often has access to the most sky.”

A study conducted by researchers at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education appears to support some of the positive claims made by teachers enthused about sky watching.

Using two classrooms at an elementary school in Needham, a community about 15 miles west of Boston, the study compared pupils who participated in “For Spacious Skies” in the fall of 1985 and again at the end of the school year to those who were not encouraged to look at the sky.

The researchers found that the emphasis on looking up, followed by drawing pictures and writing about the sky “significantly increased the level of aesthetic sensitivity in visual art and literature.

“The benefits gained from a program such as this would have a great value in any school curriculum,” the study said.

The program encourages children to keep journals on their observations, and some of them write poetry and draw pictures, said researcher Liz Rosenblatt. “The fact that kids are exposed to the arts in this way helps create an awareness that probably helps the increase in their skills.”

Familiar Poem

“For Spacious Skies” is named after the familiar first line of the Katherine Lee Bates poem, set to music by Samuel A. Ward as “America the Beautiful.”

Borden, a quixotic former television reporter, believes that we cannot spend life looking at our feet. His vision came to him about 10 years ago, while working at Boston’s WBZ-TV.

Taking to the street, he asked dozens of passers-by to describe the current sky without looking up. Only one in 10 could do so.

“I myself was a non-aware person,” Borden says. “Then I began to see that it’s a good thing to turn people on to the sky.”

Since that summer day in 1977, Borden, 59 , has formed a nonprofit company to distribute “For Spacious Skies” teaching kits, which offer suggestions on how to use the heavens to teach just about anything.

“‘For Spacious Skies’ is designed to help teach mathematics, English, creative writing, music, art and science,” according to the preface of a booklet meant for schools in the New England area. “This program, just like the New England sky, is limitless. With the sky as a catalyst, your students’ imagination can be challenged to its limits.”

The kits, which are mailed to schools for about $7.50, include guides for teachers on presenting the material. They contain tables of wind-chill factors, relative humidity and barometric pressure, songs about the sky and sample observation sheets for students to note weather conditions.

Donna Cataldo, a support specialist at Josiah Quincy, outlined the different uses of the program at her 830-pupil school:

“Some of the upper classes are keeping charts about the length of the day and how that relates to the harvest and growing cycles, and that brings out social studies . . . what are some of the origins of feast days and festivals that are based on the length of the days and the growing season.

“At lower grades, kids can do bar graphs of how many sunny days there were in January and how many snowy days there were . . . measuring and counting and a number of interdisciplinary skills. It allows children to write. They might also do a science project around wind speed.”

Gov. Michael S. Dukakis proclaimed last March 18 “For Spacious Skies Day” in Massachusetts.

The American Meteorological Society honored the program for its work in public education a year ago and scheduled presentations on “For Spacious Skies” at its annual meeting this year at Anaheim, Calif.

Key Allies

Weather forecasters are Borden’s key allies in getting the word to teachers about sky watching. Many have mentioned the program during their broadcasts, and some have gone even further, incorporating aspects of “For Spacious Skies” in weather lectures and seminars for children and teachers.

Meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler of Boston’s WBC-TV said he was amazed at the interest in “For Spacious Skies” booklets offered on the air to teachers.

“I ran a three-part series in our news last March in which we offered 3,500 teachers’ guides . . . and we had a very enthusiastic response,” he said. “They were all gone within a month.”

In Pittsburgh, weatherman Brian Sussman of KDKA-TV said his station’s booklet giveaway had similar success.

Discussing the program’s value in tougher inner-city schools, Sussman drew parallels between sports and sky watching.

“Just like athletics has been a vehicle to get kids out of the ghetto, I’m looking at ‘For Spacious Skies’ as a vehicle for sparking interest in a particular field like geography,” he said. “What I’m seeing is kids who are interested in something else than MTV. They, for the first time, are observing the beauty of nature.”

Violet Witherspoon, a disciple of sky watching who teaches the third grade at the John Marshall Elementary School in Boston’s Dorchester section, expressed similar sentiments.

“I told the children, ‘You don’t need drugs, let the sky be your drug,”’ she said.

“They can look at the sky and daydream. They don’t have to have fine clothes, they don’t have to have fine cars; beauty is all around them, and it’s free.”