Kindergarten teacher Jennifer Tamiggi called 5-year-old Jocie Smith up from her place sitting on the class rug to demonstrate a lesson about Black History Month.

Ms. Tamiggi and Jocie are both white. But when they put their arms next to each other, Jocie's skin was a little rosier, Ms. Tamiggi's more olive-toned.

"Jocie and I both have light skin, but they're both different colors," she said. "But Jocie and I both have a heart, and we're still good friends."

In the Plum School District, where the student body is about 95 percent white, Black History Month might not seem like it would be a priority.

But it's just because the district is so homogeneous that Ms. Tamiggi has made diversity lessons a centerpiece of her winter curriculum at Pivik Elementary School. Several years ago, she got a grant from the Southern Poverty Law Center to pay for special materials.

More recently, she received money from the school's Parent Teacher Association to buy additional supplies.

"In this community, you aren't exposed to a lot of differences," said Ms. Tamiggi. "But they will be when they go to college, or later in their lives."

Ms. Tamiggi first asked her class to review some of the lessons the children have learned from Martin Luther King Jr. "You're supposed to fight with your words not your fists," said 6-year-old Lucas Wycich.

She then read them a book called "The Colors of Us," about a 7-year-old girl named Lena whose skin is the color of cinnamon. Lena's friends and family spanned all colors of skin tone, from her mother with skin the color of French toast to her friend Sonia whose skin was the color of creamy peanut butter.

Using Crayola's multicultural crayons, composed of flesh tones with food labels, Ms. Tamiggi then had the students find a crayon that matched their own skin color to draw a picture of themselves. She encouraged the students to compare their hands to sample pictures she'd colored with crayons such as "nutmeg" and "apricot."

Five-year-old Brady Ferguson held his hand up to a sample picture colored with the dark color cocoa. "Ms. Tamiggi, mine's a little bit pinker," he said, eventually settling on peach instead.

"I want to expose them to diversity when they're young," said Ms. Tamiggi. "The concept of fairness and equality is such a big deal in kindergarten. You teach them about Martin Luther King Jr., and they really understand that it wasn't fair that people were treated that way."

The lesson on skin colors leads into other classes on other cultures around the world, said Ms. Tamiggi, including lessons on China, Mexico and Russia. She has used some of the grant money she's received to buy books and costumes used in those lessons.

Ms. Tamiggi has done some version of the Colors of Us lesson for the last five years. This year, she plans to collect all the pictures that the students have drawn into a book to share with their "first-grade pen pals" within their school.

At the bottom of their pictures, the students wrote what makes them special, whether it was the fact that Jocie likes peace, or in the case of 5-year-old Jamie Seneca, "I share popcorn with my sister."

The point, Ms. Tamiggi told her class, is that everyone is different both on the outside and the inside.

"Your skin color is special," she said, "and you're special no matter what your skin color is."