It's an uninspiring, grey afternoon outside, but in Tanna Hall's fifth-grade physical education class, students are deep in the zone. Their focus is fierce, and at least one student's tongue pokes out of his mouth a la Michael Jordan as he concentrates on perfecting new skills. Students are challenging each other to races and drills, and the "need for speed" is embraced with gusto by every member of the class.  Is it basketball? Volleyball? Soccer? Not even close...They're zealously stacking and unstacking sets of upsidedown plastic cups in neat pyramids at the speed of light!

Cup stacking is a sport played in over 6,600 physical education and after school programs across the country:a series of lightning-fast routines that look like a speeded-up shell game as students stack and collapse pyramids of plastic cups. "We often think of physical education in terms of gross motor skills and team sports," notes Tanna, "But P.E.'s aims are really broader: we're looking to help students develop competency in a wide range of motor skills and movement patterns that they'll need to perform physical activities throughout their lives."

"Cup stacking -- or "sport stacking" -- strengthens eye-hand coordination, concentration, and reaction time," Tanna continues."There are obvious benefits for fine motor skills like handwriting, shoe tying, keyboarding, or playing an instrument. And movements that cross the midline of the body call on both the cognitive and motor regions of the brain, so the brain makes new connections and the right and left hemispheres really start working together. Research actually shows that midline-crossing activities increase the number of synaptic connections in the brain."

Once students master the basic routines of sport stacking, the activity can be incorporated with a host of cardiovascular fitness activities, including relays, tag games, and "strength stacking" (a combination of stacking and one-armed push-ups...!). So don't worry too much if all the plastic cups suddenly go missing from your kitchen: your RDS student is just practicing for P.E.!