Making+a+Difference

Share your story about you, your class and teaching and learning

A few years ago I heard a fairly well-known story about a little girl who was determined to make a difference.

A wise man was taking a sunrise walk on the beach. In the distance he caught sight of a little girl who seemed to be dancing along the waves. As he got closer, he saw the little girl was picking up starfish from the sand and tossing them gently back into the ocean. "What are you doing?" the wise man asked. "The sun is coming up and the tide is going out; if I don't throw them in, they'll die." "But little girl, there are miles and miles of beach with starfish all along it; you can't possibly make a difference." The little girl bent down, picked up another starfish and threw it lovingly back into the ocean, past the breaking waves. "It made a difference for that one," she replied.

Another unknown author wrote, **"You may be only one person in the world, but you may also mean the world to one person."**

I have a little boy with learning and beavioural problems who doesn't know all the alphabet letters and is struggling to read.

His first step into ICT learning was taking photos of his friends and making his own reading book. This was also to help him learn children's names.

When we eventually got Kidspix loaded on classroom computers, he was one of the first to learn how to use it. I then showed him how to put an animated "A", he drew an apple and we labelled it and put music to his picture. I showed him how to save his work and move his picture into a slideshow. A teacher-aide then did letters B and C with him. He was then left to his own devices and when we turned to see how he was getting on, he was up to the letter M (with the help of an alphabet chart.) By the end of the following day, the whole alphabet was finished. I have never seen this child concentrate so long on any task before - he normally does not complete tasks set for him without 1-1 help. He had had problems - someone deleted some frames of his slideshow - and he was able to solve this problem by himself.

His next brainstorm came when the class was writing a narrative story and making their own books. His story was a dictated text. He completed his book with help and illustrated it. Then he came to me and said, "Do you know what I could do now? I could make this book into a slideshow." This opportunity had never occured to me but away he went and completed his task with words, illustrations and sound.

The rest of the class have watched his progress and are now using his ideas and extending them, as though he is now the teacher!

I recently atteneded a conference with Eric Frangenheim. One of the strategies he uses is A or B thinking. We were starting a new maths topic, mult/div, so I decided to start it off with a discussion on who is is happier - multiplication or division. After think, pair ,share, they shared their ideas. I had many varied answers, mult is happier because it gets bigger, makes more friends, division gets smaller and would eventually disappear. One of my favourites was 'division is happier because multiplication is wrong', and as he said it he crossed his arms over to make an x, very divergent thinking.(JM)