Three billy goats went out to eat, over the bridge where the grass is sweet. When the little billy goat went trip-trap-trup, the mean old troll said, "I'll eat you up!"
Twelve 4- and 5-year-olds smiled as they watched a video of themselves. They were singing and acting out the venerable fairy tale "The Three Billy Goats Gruff," which the classroom teacher, Jayne Smith, and I had recast to music. To dramatize their presentation, they used the props they had made over a four-month period—the goats, the troll, the bridge, and the grass.
One would never know that one of these youngsters, who sang clearly, had uttered only short, barely intelligible phrases before our Three Billy Goats unit. Or that another child, who sang the six verses without a hitch, had significant auditory memory difficulties.
These children were part of my 1994-95 caseload at First Foot Forward, the preschool special education program where I was a speech-language pathologist. Operated by the Jewish Community Center of Staten Island, the program serves a diverse group of children from 2 1/2 to 5 1/2 years old. All are referred by the Committee on Preschool Special Education of New York City's Community School District 31.
Classified as preschool children with disabilities, all have moderate to severe speech and language disorders. In addition, some of these children have very short attention spans for their age or impulse control problems. Some have social and emotional difficulties, including problems interacting with other children. Others lag in their cognitive or fine motor development. Still other children are unable to normally process and integrate certain sensory information. They may, for example, have abnormal responses to sound, movement, or touch. And, of course, many students experience difficulties in more than one of these areas.
The Three Billy Goats unit was the "language lesson" that Jayne and I had designed for our class of mostly second-year students. Through years of practice and modification, the weekly half-hour lesson has become a valued part of First Foot Forward's school week. Typically led by a speech-language pathologist and sometimes cotaught with the classroom teacher, the lesson supplements mandated therapy, is less clinical, and helps the children use their language and speech skills in a social setting. What was unusual about our lessons was their basis in Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences.
A Theory That Fits
The previous summer, Gardner's work had come into my life when I finally perused the unread books sitting on my desk (Gardner 1983 and 1993). By September, I was talking up multiple intelligences with the First Foot Forward staff. Jayne and I agreed that Gardner's theory explained what we did in the classroom when we were most satisfied with the results.
Our general approach was nontraditional—or at least out of the ordinary. We taught action and attribute words, for example, by making mud out of potting soil and water for our toy pigs to play in. We taught the children to produce the final p sound in words such as hop, skip, and stop by hopping and skipping in the hallway. We taught spatial concepts by moving around, through, in, and out of a hula hoop. During the Passover season, after visiting a matzo factory, we repeated the activities in our Human Matzo Factory. The children took turns being the matzo dough, which the other children mixed, rolled, poked, and baked.
Even though these activities worked, I needed a theoretical underpinning that I could explain to parents and colleagues. We found that theory in multiple intelligences. But we had to ask ourselves: Could we further improve educational outcomes for our preschoolers by structuring our language lessons around this concept? Could we improve language skills by paying more attention to other intelligences?
We began looking for literature on the application of Gardner's theory to the special needs population, and particularly preschoolers. We found little on the subject. Thus we set out to find the answer on our own.
In applying multiple intelligences, we decided to de-emphasize language—our students' weakness—and teach to their more evident intelligences while indirectly addressing their language skills. In planning our lessons we reviewed the practical advice of Lynda Miller (1991, 1992, and 1993), who suggests replacing the concept of measurable intelligence with Gardner's eight ways of being "smart." We weren't going to ignore linguistic matters; we merely vowed never to present any concept solely in linguistic terms.
All 12 of our students had basic interactive skills. And all communicated well enough to have their primary needs met. The most impaired youngster spoke in two- and three-word phrases. Two boys had hearing impairments and only recently had begun wearing hearing aids. Approximately half the class had some degree of phonological disorder—two of them severe. The other children's speech was often disorganized and contextually inappropriate. But the children had patient partners in the four adults (including two teacher assistants) working with them. We understood that their messages would require some translation or interpretation.
Experiencing Patterns
The multiple intelligences theory allowed for great flexibility in teaching and helped us integrate the many content areas around a single topic. In the fall, Jayne started with a unit on patterns. She first reviewed and retaught colors, and we then built on the content by using contrasting colors to teach the concept of patterns. Children sorted objects in an alternating red-yellow-red-yellow pattern. We gradually introduced new kinds of patterns. For example, to tap the musical intelligence, we called out the alternating colors in alternating degrees of loudness (loud red, whispered yellow).
We then introduced more challenging activities to teach new concepts. When Jayne began working on long and short, the children crawled through a long tunnel and a short barrel (bodily-kinesthetic, spatial). As each child crawled, classmates sang a song that emphasized the auditory contrasts between long and short: "Crawl, crawl, crawl through the loooong tunnel; crawl, crawl, crawl through the short! (clap) barrel," with appropriate hand gestures signifying long and short (musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial).
Finally, the children made necklaces by stringing a length of yarn with long and short pieces of dry pasta. They created a pattern by following a design "map" that Jayne had placed at each table (logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial).
Little, Medium, Big Billy Goat
By January, Jayne and I concluded that we had explored patterns sufficiently. We turned to measuring as our next theme. To teach the size concepts small, medium, and large, we decided to use "The Three Billy Goats Gruff" fairy tale. We wrote our own lyrics to support the narrative and put the words to music, using a tune familiar to the children—Raffi's "Five Little Ducks" (1980) (musical and linguistic). "Don't eat me up," said the littlest goat. "Here comes my brother, the medium goat." The grumpy troll said, "Oh, okay, hurry up and go away."
In the introductory lesson, I recited the story, using magnet figures as props and stressing the target vocabulary in my delivery (linguistic). I also used vocal variation (musical) when noting the different "trip-trap" sounds that the hooves of the different size goats might make.
In subsequent lessons, the children role-played the goats and troll characters, practicing the dialogue (linguistic) while crawling across (or lying under) a balance-beam bridge (spatial, bodily-kinesthetic). We prompted the children as necessary.
We went on to teach the concepts of temperature and tastes by preparing different kinds of "grass" for the goats to eat. Heated french-cut green beans were warm grass, shredded lettuce was cold grass, and shredded coconut tinted with green food coloring was sweet grass. We put the make-believe grass on plates, but otherwise our little student "goats" ate their food as real goats would: on the floor, on all fours, without utensils (bodily-kinesthetic, linguistic, spatial).
In the next series of activities, the children actually created the three billy goats, as well as the troll and the brick bridge. Working in groups of two to four (interpersonal), they experimented with several painting and gluing techniques to make papier-mache figures. They also solved various assembly problems in the course of constructing their troll with recycled materials (spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, linguistic, logical-mathematical).
We allotted eight weeks for the art projects. One or two adults guided each group, allowing for continued directed focus on the size concepts (linguistic, logical-mathematical).
Although we adults formally sang the song's six verses during only one lesson, we often sang the song while the children were engaged in the various activities. Eventually, any adult who began humming or whistling the tune elicited a spontaneous sing-a-long by the children. As the children became increasingly familiar with the fairy tale, Jayne read them other versions and also played other versions on audiotape.
The unit culminated with the children acting out the story once more, using the completed figures they had made. We videotaped the presentation. A reporter from the local newspaper wrote a feature story on our project. And the community center staff exhibited the artwork for two weeks in a lobby display case that was usually devoted to adult art.
Our interest in billy goats had drawn us away from our original theme—measuring. But we felt we accomplished a great deal more with the concepts we did teach.
Music to Our Ears
When we completed the unit, we found evidence of improvements in the children's ability to transfer content learning—such as size and spatial concepts—to novel situations. We also saw improvements in their ability to talk about critical elements of an event. Language was indeed one area where the students made their greatest strides, but they exhibited equally impressive improvements in their attention spans, group interaction, and self-esteem (linguistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal).
Through informal assessment, Jayne found that the children had developed a more solid grasp of the basic concepts we presented. For example, even the lowest-functioning students could correctly describe the location of an object as on or under another object. The higher-functioning students were able to use the size vocabulary, transfer the concept to some new vocabulary (for example, medium equals middle-sized), and transfer that information in turn to learning their middle names.
Most dramatic was the uniformly avid interest in learning and singing our "Three Billy Goats Gruff" song. The child who initially communicated only through short phrases was now able to perform for the class, singing the words and carrying the tune without assistance. For some children, repeated exposure to the dialogue ("I'll eat you up"; "Don't eat me up") resulted in their increasingly spontaneous use of pronouns and contractions. In addition, as a result of learning a six-verse song, the children's auditory memories improved. The child who had particular problems in this area sang the entire six verses independently, without skipping a single word.
Children also made great intrapersonal and interpersonal strides as a result of their role-playing opportunities. All of the children asked to be the troll or the big billy goat, expressing their desire to explore different personalities—in this case, evil creatures or superheroes. Equally important was the children's obviously increased self-esteem, which was reinforced by having their artwork prominently displayed in the lobby.
Each child had derived some meaning from the story and had developed at least one skill that transferred to another area of learning. From our informal observations, Jayne and I concluded that instruction in musical and bodily-kinesthetic activities best facilitated the development of language skills.
The Grass Is Sweet
Staff members benefitted along with the children. Jayne and I, as well as our two teacher assistants, Marjorie Center and Tama Feingold, found it enjoyably challenging to use a multiple intelligences framework to design instruction for the preschoolers. We had been using these concepts in First Foot Forward's other five classrooms with other staff, and with mostly good results. But we felt the process was best realized in the "Billy Goats" class.
Special educators, like educators in general, emphasize a rather finite set of behaviors and performances. When measuring educational success, they tend to identify the failings and weaknesses of students rather than celebrate and capitalize on alternative forms of smartness. Teaching to multiple intelligences was a positive, respectful way to understand all individuals as we tried to resolve conflicts between the needs of learners and the needs of teachers.
Gardner's approach is simply what I think of as good teaching. By demonstrating the value of applying the theory to the youngest and the least able learners, we revealed its efficacy for all learners.
<POEM><POEMLINE>Now three billy goats go out to eat,</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>over the bridge where the grass is sweet.</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>Every day it's trip-trap-trup:</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>There's no more troll to eat them up!</POEMLINE></POEM>
