One of the little boys in my class (we'll call him Stuart) lost his rock today. By the sound of his crying you would have thought that he had lost something much more important. Another boy had found the rock just minutes before, picked it up, and then threw it into the grassy field next to our school building as we walked from the computer lab back to our outdoor classroom.

It was one of those dramatic moments where there was only one me with two places to be at once. My whole class had already gone inside while Stuart stood alone outside on the verge of a meltdown over his lost rock. Now Stuart is not one to come when called. It takes a lot of convincing. He would not take the hand of his friends who tried to coax him back to the classroom. He would not respond to my teacher words such as "Stuart if you don't get up here now..." I could not leave my class alone and yet I could not leave him alone outside either. Finally, and I'm not sure why, he crossed the hundred yards back to where I was standing, still crying and still very much wanting to look for his rock.

In order to calm him down, I promised him that we would all go look for the rock later. When he explained what his rock looked like, so we could be sure to find the right rock, he told us that it was the one that looked like a rhinoceros' skin. Wow, maybe it really was special.

As I think about all of this, I am remembering another dramatic moment in our classroom about a week ago. It was the day that I learned hot glue really can reassemble an oyster shell. It was Stuart again, seems his backpack had been through a brutal foot stomping exercise. And inside was a shell that he had brought to show and tell for the past three weeks. Stuart found out that he had good friends that day. I would have thrown the broken remains of the shell away. Three girls in the classroom came to the rescue and pretended they were doing a puzzle. Aterwards, they asked me for the hot glue gun. Wow, my kindergarteners are smart.

Shells and rocks...treasures worth keeping with you all day long, special enough to cry over when lost, truthful enough to show you friends. Simplicity. Lord, give me understanding of such things.