Differentiation in Green

Thinking back on 20+ years of teaching, one afternoon stands out as a favorite. I was asked to cover for the special Ed teacher who needed to go home. I was teaching first grade at the time and I had a student teacher that was more than capable of leading my class without me. I said "yes," grabbed a favorite storybook (in case I needed to fill time) and was off.


I worked in a K-3 building at the time and the students came from various regular Ed classrooms to receive extra help in this small group setting.  The students were 5, 6, and 7 years old.  They wandered in and took their seats, opened their desks, got out their folders and began working, hardly even noticing me.  Each student had worksheets designed especially for him/her and it was somewhat amazing to watch how well-behaved and quiet they entered the room and set to work. I wanted to know them and I wanted to introduce myself, so I asked if they wouldn't mind coming to the floor and introducing themselves and listening to a story before they got to their seat work. They all smiled and agreed. After introductions I read to them, Dear Children of the Earth, by Schim Schimmel.  It happened to be Earth Day and I couldn't help but share this beautiful story with them. The students were so drawn into both the message and the pictures that even I saw details and animals I had never noticed before. We discussed the differences between a tiger and a lion and identified all sorts of other animals and images.


By the end of the book, it didn't seem right to simply send the students back to their seats and return to the prescribed worksheets.  I asked them if they had ever gone out on the back trails behind the school (I took my first graders on walks there all the time and it was actually my inspiration for the LHB trails when I transferred to North Shore Elementary). These students had never been out on the trails and were very excited about the prospect.  We decided to go out and look for anything that was green.  It was so fun to see them running and pointing and talking about everything green. We identified all sorts of green things that day and they became something like 'green experts.' We returned to the classroom and I wrote, "green" on the board and we made a huge word web of all things green. When someone said that the trees were green, I asked, "Was the whole tree green?"  And of course, they let me know it was really the leaves that were green.  This little lesson on green had become a vocabulary lesson as well.  Next, I gave them each paper and asked them to get out their crayons and draw, like scientists, what they saw and label each green item in their pictures. One student immediately took out a red crayon and held it in his tiny fingers like a knife. I stopped them all and said, "Silly me!  I forgot one instruction . . . you need to mostly use your green crayon, so get out your green crayon."  That student redirected himself and he and I worked a bit on his pencil grip. Others needed help writing or finding the word on the board that matched their picture as they labeled each item.  One student was clearly a bit more advanced and I asked him to write me a complete sentence to go with his picture.


I was kept busy with the various levels of ability and needs but everyone worked so hard, we just had to share our work with each other. We came back down to the rug and one by one shared our pictures. By this time, there was only half an hour or so left of school and we continued (we were already well off course without any hope of getting to those worksheets).  I brought the book back out and said, "This story is really a letter; it's a letter from Mother Earth to us...what if we wrote a letter back to her?" The students' eyes grew big, "Can we really do that?!"  "Sure!" I said.  "We'll write a letter and it will be from all of us!"  They were so excited!  We looked back into the book for the details of letter writing and we wrote a beautiful heartfelt letter to Mother Earth.

What fun we had that day! The whole afternoon was like the unfolding of a beautiful flower. From then on, if I saw one of those students in the hall or lunchroom, he/she would smile real big and wave or whisper to a friend and point to me and smile and I would do the same. We shared smiles and waves the rest of that year and remembered our quest for green on a beautiful afternoon.  I for one, will never forget it.



Here's what I reminded myself of on that day . . . differentiated instruction doesn't have to mean, every child is working on a small set of prescribed skills.  It doesn't require stacks of individualized worksheets.  It doesn't require detailed assessments to figure out what students know and don't know.  It requires listening to students and it requires instruction that is open-ended enough to let them work and explore and find joy in learning at their own level.  When we do this, students learn something bigger than the color green or the first letter in grass is g.  They learn the joy and wonder of life and learning.



In his 1905 book The Nature-Study Idea, Liberty Hyde Bailey answered the question, "What may be the results of nature-study?"

"Its legitimate result is education-- the developing of mental power, the opening of the eyes and the mind, the civilizing of the individual.  As with all education, its central purpose is to make the individual happy; for happiness in nothing more nor less than pleasant and efficient thinking.  It is often said that an ignorant man may be as happy as the educated man.  Relatively, this is true; absolutely, it is not.  A ten-foot well is not so deep as a twenty-foot well; and although the ten-foot well may be full to the brim, it holds only half as much water as the other."

We are called as educators to help students dig their wells deep, to find joy in learning and to remember that happiness is the real root of education.  When we do that, our joy is also deepened --how could it not be?  Happy learning and living!