Your students take forever to settle down and start the Do Now. Or you wish there was something new to add to that unit on European history. Maybe there’s a certain dullness today that needs a spark.
Try an Education Spring Why Not?—a semi-serendipitous drop of shine in your students’ day. They learn something new. It activates energy. And you all have fun.
Here’s Francois Couperin’s (1688-1733) Le Tic-Toc-Choc ou les Maillotins, a three minute piece of joy:
Have you tried the “walk and talk” approach to student discussions?
Pair up students to discuss a concept you’re teaching. Take them outdoors—into nature’s classroom—for a brief walk, during which they’ll discuss and analyze the topic, with the mission of increasing their depth of understanding.
Upon return, ask them to write a short piece evaluating what they learned from their partner.
Connecting with fresh air, sky, and earth have a way of tossing around our minds and mixing in a new perspective. When you teach students the benefits of refreshing themselves outdoors—walking, talking, listening, noticing—you introduce them to a new place to think, to reflect, and to be.
Lots of people watch hummingbirds at their backyard feeders. But watching their ½” eggs hatch is fascinating.
My local birding store turned me on to Bella and I can’t stop watching. Your students won’t either.
Here’s a science unit that will last a few weeks. Tune in to this site and your students will be immediately engaged.
Have students journal their observations and the questions they discover. That alone will teach them more than any science text could.
Imagine a classroom full of bright faces eager to learn the science of growing plants. 
They’ve read books
to learn about the parts of a plant, looked at photos of growing plants, written poems about plants, and interviewed their parents about gardens.
The final step is to grow their own plants. Their teacher knows there isn’t a dime left in the materials budget.
Then she has a brainstorm.
Over the next week, she saves the clear, shallow, salad bar container she buys at lunch. At home, she finds leftover soil and a half-used bag of grass seed languishing in the garage.
Back at school, she gives each small group one container. From there, the students handle it. They fill it up with soil. A generous fistful of seeds covers the top. The children water their containers and place them on the warm windowsill.
On Monday, they dash in and check on their seeds. Every container has at least one spindly thread reaching up, a cause for excitement. They count and check their measurements, estimations, and predictions. They discover that they must adjust the watering schedule as days pass.
Soon the containers have a lush, spring green carpet of grass growing. The students pass their containers around, examining the root systems and remarking on the length of the grass.
Best of all? They touch the grass. Their fingers wind in and out of individual pieces. They stroke the grass from soil to tip, saying they never realized how soft new grass was.
The children’s strokes turn to caresses, much like they’d do with a beloved pet. Before they know it, the grass is bent over flat from so much love.
The teacher asks them, What do you think will happen next?
“Were you painting outside?” asked my husband. He knew the answer. 
And it wasn’t that one of our resident woodchucks had awakened and marched outside dragging paints and a brush.
A rediscovered, unused set of acrylic paints had awakened me. I gathered a handful of brushed and dashed outside to my canvas: the snow.
Flicks of red, arcs of green, drops of blue, inclusive of animal tracks. The brushes were too small to get the effects I wanted. My hands froze without gloves. But it wasn’t the final product that mattered, it was the desire to try something new and enjoy the fun of self-expression.
Most children feel this way, too. They like to enjoy the freedom to express themselves in new ways.
If they paint in the snow, let them see how their art changes with lower temperatures.
Teachers, lead your children to fling around some paint today. Parents or grandparents? You come, too.*
*Phrase borrowed from The Pasture by Robert Frost (c. 1915)
A few days ago, our family lost our beloved 17-year-old mini poodle, Muffy.
Saddled with a girl’s name, Muffy lived a pretty healthy life. Though he endured infirmities as a senior, we accommodated him by finding snuggly blankets, adjusting his water bowl to a comfortable height, and carrying him in and out.
In his younger days, I brought Muffy to school and the students made him an instant celebrity. He’d never had so many stories read to him in one day. The students showed empathy and kindness, something we now have entire curricula to teach.
I admire teachers who keep pets in the classroom because they seem to have a special insight into children. Their focus tends to be less about teaching children responsibility and more about what each of us learns from animals. I know educators who bring their dogs to school and I’ve seen how stroking them helps evoke a kind of mellow grace in students. Especially in older students.
Other colleagues of mine have created ingenious roles for animals in schools. One kept an aquarium with a student desk and chair parked in front of it. She’d read that watching fish could help children self-regulate, and she had a couple of students in mind. The rest of the class wanted to use the aquarium for quiet thinking, too. Soon she had to post a sign-up sheet.
Another teacher kept a rabbit hopping around freely. You might think that would distract first graders, but not at all. The children easily integrated the rabbit into their routines and learned to step carefully around him. The rabbit used a litter box, too.
In one urban school, a teacher kept two guinea pigs in a huge cage on legs. She made it into a writing center. Children drew their chairs around all four sides, some propping up their feet on its edge. The guinea pigs went on with their lives as students watched them and worked on writing projects. Each child who wanted to hold one knew the procedure for letting out the guinea pigs, always putting the animal’s needs first.
Empathy, kindness, care, grace, sharing, patience–that’s a short list of what students learn from school pets. How lucky the world is when children carry those forward.
January doesn’t usually remind us about Christopher Columbus, but on January 9, 1493, he described seeing mermaids swim near the Dominican Republic. (See the History Channel’s “On this Day in History.”)
However, Columbus was mistaken. What he saw were not mermaids swimming, but manatees. These animals are exceptionally lovely. Large and slow-moving mammals, manatees eat plants and swim in shallow water. Their faces hold a kind sweetness. It’s easy to see why Columbus thought they were mermaids.
Teacher reflection had a whole new meaning for me after I met my first manatee.
Introduce your students to manatees. Not everything we teach our students has to be a huge curriculum unit. Give your students access to pictures, maps, and reading about manatees. Begin conversations about them during quiet moments. A good place for information is at National Geographic, where students can listen to the repertoire of manatee sounds.
And after your students learn about manatees, ask them to think up reasons why Columbus mistook them for mermaids.
What issues in our world fill you with passion?
Perhaps you’re working to gain freedom for the children in Tibet. Maybe fracking issues make you crazy or you are a member of Veterans for Peace. Or your focus might be more local, like saving a silver maple forest in a cherished reservation.
Do you care enough to grab your tuba or push yourself down the street with a couple of plungers?
Because that’s what people did at the 2014 HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands in Somerville and Cambridge, MA. The parade mixed zeal with fun and educated the spectators, providing welcome relief from the litany of terrible world problems in the news. Not that the HONK! groups didn’t make their points. They did. And they used larger-than-life sized puppets and funky costumes to do it.
Making the usual, unusual gives messages a fresh emphasis. Everyone in this parade found a personal and artistic perspective in community with others. That’s a valuable set of life lessons for all of us, accompanied by a dash of AfroBrazilian percussion.
I love to see parents and grandparents teaching children how to help change a larger world than their own. When learning starts in the family, it settles into childrens’ souls. And when it’s lodged there, you’ve given children tools that no one else but you can give. Add in some glitter and an orange feather boa–who knew that changing the world could be so much fun?
This year, Sam’s school hired a science specialist. Every Tuesday she rolls her supply-stocked cart from room to room and teaches the science content students must know by spring. Sam’s class’s 40-minute slot begins at 10:20.
“I hate to admit it, but I’m relieved,” he said. “It’ll free me up to focus on my kids’ literacy and math. Divide and conquer, I guess.”
Conquer science? Yes. Divide the responsibility? No—share the responsibility.
While Sam’s school made good use of a grant to address science learning, Sam and I talked about how to incorporate science into the life of the classroom. It’s our job to help tomorrow’s scientists—who are in front of us today—learn to wonder, question, experiment and imagine.
Also, to boost my case, I mentioned that if worms could talk they’d suggest that Sam start a worm farm.
Worms are the perfect classroom companions and they teach while they work. I shared my experiences creating worm farms from scratch: kids bring in the materials, create the farm, add the worms, and by this point they’ve already learned a lot. Sam wrote down a supply list:
Let the students do everything, I advised, and leave plenty of time to touch and examine everything. Then:
My students decided to give the worms a couple weeks of peace before peeking behind the paper to see the magic. Worms in tunnels! Vacant tunnels! Leaves munched! Castings left behind!
The students’ curiosity exploded. They talked, listened, read, wrote, drew, measured, questioned, problem solved, researched and wondered about worms. The best assessment of their learning? Overhearing students talk about worms with each other in casual conversation.
At times, no one gave the worms a thought and we focused on other science topics. Then someone would wander over to the worms, pull away the paper and discover there was plenty more to observe and discover.
Of course, this isn’t just about worms. It’s about creating interdisciplinary learning in science that works because it’s hands-on and fun. It’s naturally differentiated and inspires. It’s available to every student, all day and all year. Sam pointed out that it meets practically every goal in the Common Core standards, too.
Faster than you can say oligochaetologist, Sam was on board. He also remembered reading a poem by Edgar Allan Poe in college–so here is “The Conquering Worm” for you to appreciate in all its gothic splendor. Have some fun reading it before you invite your worms to school.
Education Spring 