Exercise balls keep students focused

DECATUR, Ill. — During the first few days with the kids on exercise balls instead of chairs, Durfee Magnet School teacher Morgan Rufty had to pick a spot on the wall to focus on to keep from having motion sickness.

She’s used to it now, and if she’s trying to talk to an incessantly bouncing child, she gives them a hand signal and they stop.

“I tell them (the balls) are a privilege, and we’re the only classroom that has them,” Rufty said.

A first-year teacher, Rufty got the idea during her junior year at Millikin University, when she heard about a teacher who had replaced students’ chairs with exercise balls. At the time, she said, she thought that teacher was “brave.”

Now that all her students have them, she said, she sees their worth.

“I had a couple of kids who had a hard time staying in their seat,” she said. “They were always up and distracting other kids, so I got two exercise balls. We call them `thrones.’ I gave them to two students, and they got to sit on them for a day. Then they got to pass them to someone else who had been behaving and doing a good job, and that created community in our classroom.”

She bought two more because the first two were a success, and Principal Kirk Veitengruber told her there were grants for such things. She secured one and bought enough for every child. While the chairs are stacked in the closet and students are welcome to switch to a chair any time they like, most stick with their bouncy seats most of the time.

“People’s backs were hurting,” said 9-year-old Brycton Curry. “Chairs make your back hurt. Nobody’s back hurts now.”

The balls make school more fun, said Angel Hodges, 8, and any time she feels restless, she bounces a bit and can go back to work with renewed concentration.

“I love them,” said Melody Tillis, who is celebrating her 10th birthday today.

Rufty said she has seen research that says something as simple as sitting on an exercise ball can improve retention and concentration, so when she gave tests a little while after beginning to use them, she compared the scores of students who were sitting on exercise balls to those who weren’t, and the ones on the balls did better on the test.

The kids think so, too. Lavon Crue, 8, said he thought he did better on his Illinois Standards Achievement Test because of the exercise ball.

“It’s been really awesome,” Rufty said. “I couldn’t have expected it to go any better.”