Spin plates, walk on stilts, juggle pins!

Junior School kids get to have all the fun at The McDonald College.

Circus Skills is an optional after-school activity designed for our Years 3 – 6 kids who want to learn new skills in a fun environment.

Two skills that are often first mastered are plate-spinning and juggling. Activities that develop coordination and fine motor skills.

Learning to juggle is a great way to develop resilience. Learning to juggle and to plate spin is easy in theory but much harder in practice – meaning that it comes with a fair share of failure. As educators, we recognise that failure is natural and essential to learning.

To juggle successfully you need to develop the discipline to keep practicing until you finally get it.

There’s also developing the mindset of continuous improvement – reviewing and refining: to keep tweaking here and there, until it finally works.

Resilience, discipline and the mindset of continuous improvement are all soft skills that are extremely useful when transferred to other types of learning.

In Circus Skills we often start with juggling silks and then progress to three balls or sacks but even in our small group there are opportunities to juggle rings, pins and – for the very brave – juggling knives (!) This one always seems to be a favourite at our Starburst performances.

From juggling, the children progress to balance skills that might involve walking on stilts, balancing on a wobbleboard or even riding a unicycle.