The Legend of the Golden Boot Transforms After-School Learning for Juniors

Meet Zoomba, an eight year-old monkey who, from behind cage bars, envied the lives of children laughing, talking and playing freely at the zoo.  That all changed one day when he stumbled upon a magic, Golden Boot empowering him to learn human words and games, like soccer.  Zoomba tried to share these gifts with his zoo-animal friends, but they only fought over the shiny cleat and its powers. When Zoomba noticed an America SCORES coach at the zoo this fall he enlisted the Junior SCORES poet-athletes to help the animals live, learn and play like kids on a real soccer team.

The zoo animals fight over the Boot.

This October coaches showed up to the first day of the Junior SCORES season at eight San Francisco public schools with an authentic Golden Boot, Zoomba’s plea for help, and original, color illustrations of the animals.  After immediately connecting with the Boot and Zoomba’s dilemma, students were bursting with stories and advice for their new friend.  “Does Zoomba know Spanish?” asked one boy, as he got to work with his classmates creating a sign with “fair-play rules” that animals could post by the make-shift pitch in their cage.  Other children created a team flag as a model for the animals or wrote notes introducing themselves and their schools.  Over 120 1st and 2nd graders spent the next few weeks writing letters and poetry, creating artwork, completing team challenges, solving word puzzles and sharing the stories of their childhood to help the zoo animals become a soccer team.

Cleveland Junior SCORES team gathering around the Golden Boot!

The Juniors soon discovered that the Golden Boot’s true magic was not just for soccer-playing animals.  In setting out to help Zoomba, students also connected to America SCORES teammates by sharing their own stories, writing creatively, playing cooperative games, and finding their voices together.  They internalized the same “fair play” lessons they taught the animals.  During one activity where teams passed the Boot in a circle while sharing poetry, students commented that the Golden Boot gave them the power to speak with confidence.  The kids never asked why they had to spend their after-school time writing poetry or stories.  They were too busy trying to help Zoomba and protect the Golden Boot!

The Legend of the Golden Boot employs an exciting, new pedagogy called story-based learning, which uses a narrative to engage students in educational activities.  To develop the program, America SCORES Bay Area worked closely with Suzanne Popkin, a literature professor at Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley, and founder of Bookboing, a company that develops educational, interactive story-based software. She defines story-based learning as a five-step process:

1. Students develop a connection with characters and become engaged in a plot.
2. The characters face a challenge.
3. The narrator asks the students to help the character in order to move the story forward.
4. The narrator gives hints and instruction when needed.
5. Students learn and demonstrate a new skill to help the character and resolve tension in the story.

The approach is helping us think about the way students learn in and out of school.  School is largely a game students play, often competing for points out of 100 or a grade.  Because of the rules of the game, some children do better than others.  When students are engaged in a narrative and create connections with characters and classmates, the rules for learning are re-written in a more fun, relevant and captivating way for many children.  As a first grader, would you rather work for a magic, golden boot, or a B+?

The Legend of the Golden Boot helped students use their imaginations to leave the stresses of the classroom behind when the bell rang each day, and learn through playing.  It is one thing to teach students how to summarize a story in order to score well on a test.  It is another to make a student a character in a season-long story and ask her to share her own experience interacting with the other characters and the plot.  Einstein once said, “Imagination is greater than knowledge,” and story-based learning is the ultimate exercise in sustained imagination.

Just when the Juniors truly appreciated the power of the Golden Boot in Week 5 of their fall season, they discovered it had been stolen!  It was up to them to go on a scavenger hunt, use their reading skills to piece together clues and put a team project together to meet the ransom demands of the Boot’s thief.  They succeeded, and had one last task — to crack to code of the cage lock and help Zoomba go free.  Zoomba learned so much from the Juniors this season, that he shared his own poem to show his appreciation:

I’m free! Thanks to you I’m free of the zoo
Now there are so many things that I want to do

I want to flip and slide, to hop and swing
to dance and twirl, to rap and to sing

To catch, and throw, and run the bases
Wear socks and shoes and tie my laces

I want to taste new foods, like pizza and pears
to smell the outdoors, the park and ocean air

How does your playground and classroom look?
I’ll read that in my new Important Book!

You taught me I don’t need some magic shoe,
I just need some kind words and help from you.

Now there are so many things I’d like to try
So much to do before the day goes by

But wait. What should I do first?
And why?

Stay tuned for more news on the Juniors’ next big adventure, starting in early March!

Acknowledgements:  The Legend of the Golden Boot was created by Marty Mannion and Cyrus Philbrick of America SCORES Bay Area, in collaboration with Suzanne Popkin of Bookboing.  All illustrations and artwork were created by Maybelline Chow with additional design work by Dan Schwer of America SCORES Bay Area.