Author Archives: Janelle Durham

About Janelle Durham

I am a parent educator and social worker, and teach music and science to children age 1 - 8.

Process over Product

You may hear early childhood educators say “Focus on Process more than Product.” Let’s explore what they mean by process and product, and some concrete tips on how to stay focused on the process.

In product-focused activities, the teacher or parent has a finished product in mind and has created a sample for children to copy, children have instructions to follow and all the children’s finished products look similar to each other. The closer the result is to the displayed sample, the more the adult will tend to praise the child for doing it well.

There is definitely a place for product-focused activities, and learning how to follow directions to create something specific. This can be an excellent way to learn certain skills. But, if children only follows directions, it can limit their creativity and limit their learning. It can also create stress if they feel like they have to do things ‘the right way.’

The three pictures below show paintings made using a flower as a paint brush. The lovely picture on the left is from here. The others are from 3 year olds in my class. All we did was set out paper, paint, and flowers, and the kids in our class had a fabulous time exploring this art experience. But imagine if we had set the painting of the flowers in a vase on the table at the start of class. How would that have affected the kid’s process and product?)

So, we want a balance of product and process in our child’s lives. For example, if your child gets a Lego set and follows the directions precisely to create the model as designed, they learn about paying close attention to directions, doing things in the right order, and not leaving out any steps. They are satisfied with their result. But then, you can encourage them to take that Lego set apart when they’re ready, and mix it with their other Legos, and play as long as they want, and build anything they want to build, they might use skills learned to build a bridge over “water”. This spontaneous building to meet a play goal is the process-focused side of Legos.

In process-focused activities, the focus is on experience, and exploration of tools and techniques. It is completely child-guided, with no right or wrong way of exploring. Children decide whether or not to do the activity, and how much time to spend on it. Examples in our classroom include: the water table, sensory table, block building, easel painting, “creation station” collages, and collaborative group art projects. We also do lots of explorations of scientific ideas and engineering projects which we think of as “tinkering.” These process-based activities do not lead to beautiful masterpieces to hang on the refrigerator or mail to grandparents. But they do lead to lots of fun and lots of learning.

Ways that you can support the Process:

When planning an activity, instead of asking “what will the children make”, ask “what will the children do?” and “what materials can I put out that invite creativity and learning?” If your child asks “what am I supposed to do?” you can say “I see lots of cool supplies and tools on this table. Want to try them out? What would you like to do with them?”
Approach the project like open-ended play. Let it be a joyful experience.
Provide plenty of uninterrupted time for kids to explore. Let them decide how long to spend on an activity. Some days you’ll put out an “invitation to play” and it will captivate them for hours. Other days, they’ll have other ideas of their own to pursue and barely skim past something that you planned.
Let go of your own judgments. Process-focused art and building projects can seem messy and pointless. Don’t think of them as a waste of materials, think of the brain cells your child is building through this experience and the skills they’ll learn now and apply to later efforts!
If you’re sitting with a child who is doing art or building something, try to copy what they are doing. Otherwise, they will try to copy you, and think that the way you’re doing it is the “right” way. They may be disappointed when their item is not as good as yours.
Or, if you’re playing side by side with them, make some mistakes: paint with your non-dominant hand, or build a tower too tall so it falls over. Let them see you explore.
Don’t ask them “what is it” – ask “tell me about what you’ve done.”
Don’t distract them with irrelevant questions. If they’re completely engaged in a process, don’t interrupt it with a name-this-color quiz.
Don’t decide for them that they are done. Often adults watch for when there’s a “nice” painting, and then offer to take the paper away before the child “messes it up.” Or they watch a child building and realize that it’s all about to come tumbling down, so they encourage the child to stop and not add that toppling brick on the top.
Ask them if they want to write their name on their art. If they say yes, then ask “would you like me to write it or do you want to?” If they want you to write it, ask where to write it. Ask them where they want to put it. On the refrigerator or in the recycling bin? Try to not be disappointed in their choices of what to keep and what to let go of.

As your child gets older, more and more of their time will be dedicated to products – book reports, math tests, science fair presentations, scoring goals at soccer, and more. Lots of time “doing things the right way.”

The early years should focus much more on process. All of a baby’s play time is process and free exploration. A toddler’s life should be about 90% process, 10% focused on specific accomplishments – learning to undress themselves, learning to eat with a fork, holding a pencil and making a scribble, stacking a few blocks to make a tower. In the preschool years, we may aim for 80% process, 20% product. Never think of the process as a less valuable learning experience. It’s building creativity, inspiring curiosity, helping them make unexpected connections, and getting them excited about what they can do ‘all by themselves.’

Thanks to these articles for inspiration:

Click to access art%20workshop%202022%20handout.pdf

http://www.naeyc.org/tyc/article/process-art-experiences

http://prekandksharing.blogspot.com/2012/02/making-transition-from-product-to.html

http://www.prekandksharing.blogspot.com/2012/02/childrens-art-process-versus-product.html

What children learn in a multi-age classroom

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A while back, I wrote about mixed-age play and the benefits of multi-age classrooms. Today, I’ll describe what the learning experience is like for different ages of children at my Family Inventors’ class. We enroll children ages 3 – 7. When I say that to many preschool teachers, they are startled, saying “that’s a really wide range of developmental abilities! How does that work out?” We think it works great!

Why do we teach mixed age?

We want to be able to welcome a whole family in to participate. We are a parent co-op, which means that parents work in the classroom once a month, and they typically “stay and play” with their child on the days they’re not working. We want it to be possible for parents to be able to attend the class with all of their children. About a third of our families have two children in the class. We’ve had a couple families where three kids fit in our age range!

But it’s also because we believe in the benefits of multi-age classrooms: the younger kids tend to learn faster and learn more when they can observe the older children’s learning process. The older kids learn empathy and responsibility by interacting with the younger ones, but they also learn the academic concepts better through the process of explaining their ideas to the younger kids.

Can the little ones follow all the ideas you cover?

We are a STEM-based program. Some of our themes this year are: Chemistry – Solutions; Biology – Habitats; Building Towers, Tunnels and Bridges; and a multi-week unit on Simple Machines. We talk about these ideas in circle time and read books about them, but we also have lots of hands-on exercises to help children explore and discover some of the foundations of science. We expect that our 5 – 7 year olds will understand everything we teach. And they do. They’re able to understand the ideas, apply them to the class exercises, and extrapolate from them to a deeper understanding. They remember the concepts we talked about in circle.

Our pre-K age kids (age 4 – 5) get some of the ideas. They definitely understand the hands-on exercises and experience “gravity” and can describe to you what it is that they’ve learned about how gravity affects something. They don’t necessarily make any leaps beyond what we cover in class, and they may or may not remember the concept behind the exercises a few months later. (But, if you ask them to repeat an activity they learned in class… like asking “If I roll a toy car down this steep ramp and another one down this not-so-steep ramp, which will go faster”, they will remember that hands-on learning.) They definitely grasp more concepts by watching the older kids’ “a-ha moments” than they would grasp if the class was just adults telling them stuff.

Our littlest ones, the young 3’s, may not get the scientific concepts at all. And we don’t expect them to. What they get is a great preschool class with water play, sensory play, play-dough, building with blocks, stories, songs, and outdoor time – things that build small motor-skills, large motor skills, musical skills, language, and social development. They get exposed to lots of opportunities to play with how the world works. They rub balloons on their hair to make their hair stand up. We play with things that float on water and things that sink. We play with balls that roll down tracks. Some day, later in life, when someone talks to them about static electricity or buoyancy, or when they want to build their own marble maze, they’ll have this foundational knowledge in their brain, ready to be built upon.

What about the social dynamics?

In general, our olders play very well with our youngers. They naturally mentor them and help them out with simple tasks, like writing their names or tearing off a piece of tape. The children who are older siblings do especially well at this. But, for those who don’t have a younger sibling at home, it’s a great chance to practice interacting with someone who is younger and less knowledgeable than they are.

Our younger kids love having the big kids to follow around. They learn from them, play with them, imitate them. They may turn to an older child for help with things instead of always turning to adults for help, and learn more in the process.

For us as the teachers having this wide age range is definitely a challenge for curriculum planning. For each activity, we think about how each age of child can learn from it. For example, a simple activity might be setting out plastic bugs and containers on a table. The littlest children just play with the bugs and move them around and in and out of containers however they want (practicing small motor skills). The middle-ages may be encouraged to count them OR to taught the difference between beetles and spiders and flying bugs and asked to sort them. The oldest kids are asked to figure out what the three types of bugs are, then sort them into categories and then count how many of each category there are.

If we’re building pompom launchers with plastic spoons, rubber bands and craft sticks, we show the young ones how to build one (and help them as needed) then encourage them to play with them. For the older children, we let them figure out how to build one by looking at the prototype. We have them test it, then set a goal for themselves – do they want it to launch multiple pompoms? Or launch further? Or with more accuracy? We encourage them to tinker and adapt their designs using other available materials to achieve their goals.

We can’t assume that any of our students know how to read, but many of them do. And parents are always around to read for them if needed. So, we do put out signs at each activity that explain how it connects to the concepts of the day. And some weeks, like our “What is a Scientist” week, we put out worksheets that encourage children to do an experiment and record their results (like how many times a flipped coin lands heads-up or how many drops of water can they put on a penny). We’re hopeful that our oldest kids get some math and writing practice at those stations, but we figure our youngest kids get to learn how to flip a coin and notice that it has two different sides, and get to learn the fine motor skill of using an eye dropper and the hand-eye coordination of trying to get the drops to land on a penny. There is learning at every level.

When providing all this individualized learning, it helps a lot that we have a lot of adults in the room. In addition to our teachers, as a co-op, we also have some parents working in the classroom each week, and because we’re a Saturday class, the majority of parents actually stay-and-play each week. So, there’s always a grown-up around to help, but we also encourage the parents to sit back and let their children explore independently and support each other’s learning whenever possible.

The most exciting part is when kids come back year after year – we’ve had children join us for three or four years in a row. We see them go from the three year old who is splashing in the water table and finger painting to the 6 year old who is exploring our challenge projects, and stretching their learning to new levels of understanding. Although they may be doing the same activity they did the previous year, their level of skill mastery and understanding has stepped up a huge notch.

Deane Children’s Park on Mercer Island

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One of the joys of living in King County is our parks departments… even after 25 years of living here, and 21 years of parenting, which leads me to park after park, I am still discovering truly fabulous new-to-me parks. Today’s discovery was Deane Children’s Park on Mercer Island.

This morning, I turned to a trusty resource: ParentMap. Specifically, this article on the most adventurous playgrounds around Seattle. They pointed to Deane’s as having one of the best climbing wall playgrounds. (A few weeks ago, we checked out Jefferson Park in south Seattle, which was also mentioned in this article. Jefferson Park is fabulous! Our son loved the zip line and the really tall, really fast slide.)

Deane Children’s Park is located at Island Crest Park, 5500 Island Crest Way on Mercer Island, just south of Island Park school. It is the same park that hosts the Adventure Playground (more on that below.)

Here’s what we found at Deane’s (click on any photo to see a bigger version of it):

The climbing wall playground:

The big playground:

The castle playground:

And the dragon playground:

Yes, that’s four separate fabulous playground areas, all within spitting distance of each other! All of which are good enough on their own to justify a trip to Mercer Island. And that’s not counting the two areas with swings, or the climbing sculpture by the entrance. Or the little hikes through the woods, or the xylophone, or cool little details on the playgrounds like the abacus. (Note: the xylophone is dedicated to Judy Witmer, who has been lead teacher at Mercer Island Learning Lab – a program of Bellevue College Parent Education – for about 30 years.) The dragon playground has a fun history – the original dragon was built in 1965. By 2013, it was in poor condition. The arts coordinators on Mercer Island went searching for the original sculptor – they found him, now an 81 year old artist living in Montana. Here’s the story of how he created the new dragon.

And… there’s also the Adventure Playground. Where they hand kids hammers, nails, safety goggles, and wood, and let them build whatever they want! Read my post on it here.

If you have a child who is five or over who likes to build, check it out!

So, lots of great play areas in one park. And, as you can see from the photos, plenty of shade for hot summer days. We had a fabulous time there today, ending with bagels from Einstein’s on our way home.

Read about more local parks: St. Edward’s, OO Denny and Big Finn Hill in Juanita; Farm Parks in Bellevue and Redmond; the dog park at Marymoor. Or check out ParentMap for lots more park reviews.

Mindport in Bellingham

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In Bellingham, WA, there’s a fascinating place called Mindport.

It’s a little like an art gallery full of beautifully crafted exhibits… but unlike art galleries, you get to touch and interact with everything! It’s a little like a children’s museum where children are welcomed and can explore and play with everything… but the exhibits are intriguing enough that all the adults in the room were as engaged as the kids. It’s like a science museum with exhibits that illustrate scientific concepts – and binders that explain the details… but it’s prettier, and somehow more soothing and meditative, than any science museum I’ve been in.

Here’s how their website defines what they are:

MINDPORT (mind port) n.: 1. a museum of phenomena; 2.) a provocative blend of art and interactive exhibits; 3.) a place to spark your awareness and stimulate your thinking; 4.) a place to play and to observe.

Before going to Mindport, I read a review that said “everything about them is amazing… except their website.” I have to agree. The website only includes brief descriptions of a few of the exhibits, and a brief description of “what are we” is buried way down in the blog archives. Not enough to give you a good sense of what to expect. So, I’m going to give some detailed descriptions here of the experience and some of the exhibits, then offer a few more photos as “teasers” of what else you’ll discover here.

The Location

Mindport is in downtown Bellingham, WA. It’s in a retail storefront space, about the size of two typical stores, so not huge. Admission is only $2. There are lots of restaurants and other museums within walking distance. It was fairly busy for the first hour or two we were there (on July 3), but never crowded and never loud. By the end of our time there (mid-afternoon), we were the only family, and had some nice chats with a very friendly and helpful docent, and our son got to play the pipe organ, which they ask that only skilled musicians play when it’s crowded, as you can hear it throughout the museum.

The Exhibits

The first exhibit we came to (#1 in the photos above) was the deep sea divers. Pump a hand bulb and plastic divers descend down the tube toward you. Stop pumping, and they pop back up to the surface. Our four year old had a hard time pumping effectively, but a 6 year old did great. They both liked seeing the divers come down.

They had a ball wall (#2). As people who frequent children’s museums and science museums across the country, we are connoisseurs of ball walls, also known as marble runs. (For ideas on how to build your own, check out my post here.) I really liked this peg board system, and all the different sizes of tracks available (notice the rack to the left with all the tracks organized and ready to use.) It was very adjustable and we found lots of fun ways to build it then re-engineer it. (Which is why I love ball walls. I think they’re a fabulous way to teach your child the engineering method: build something – test it – adjust it so it works – test it – adjust it again to make it even better – test it again. Read my post here on how willingness to fail and try again is a key to success.) Only downside – they only had three marbles. I understand not having too many, because then kids don’t chase them down when they escape the ball run and other people step on them. But 5 would be nice so me and a couple kids could play at the same time.

The Aerotrack (#3) allows you to put a ball in a pneumatic tube, then air shoots it along a track and returns it to you. You can choose three tracks. One is very short and very fast. One takes the ball all the way up to ceiling height, then around several loops before returning it to you. My engineering-minded husband enjoyed figuring out where the switching point was and how it changed which track it went on. (I won’t tell you – we’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.) This was one of our son’s favorite exhibits. The museum was small enough and mellow enough that we were able to leave him here playing while we explored other exhibits nearby, which I appreciated. (Unlike other times where I’ve been stuck at a ball wall or other exhibit for an hour while he played and I read Facebook on my phone… I mean, I like playing with him at an exhibit and all… but this boy has a LONG attention span and a greater joy in repetition than I apparently have…)

#4 is the Diabalique, a table that you tilt side to side to run balls through a maze. Read a short article on it here, or watch the “Making of” video.

#5 is “Burl Ives”, a piece of burl wood that when you rock it gently from side to side, it plays musical tones. So hard to explain – I wish I’d made a video, but very intriguing to play with, probably even more so for a very musically oriented person.

#6 and 7 are the Pneumatic Ping Pong. The majority of the exhibits have signs that explain how they work and binders that talk about either the design process or the scientific principles. The sign on this one says “Note: we only added instructions here because a visitor asked why there weren’t any. Please feel free to pretend there still aren’t. 1. Press the on button. 2. Play.” Here’s a brief video:

Playing with lightweight objects floating on air currents is just an on-going source of fun for kids (and yes, for me). We’ve built a wind tube (see more here), and what I call a “scarf poof” – like all those exhibits at children’s museums where you feed a scarf into a tube, and the air shoots it through and out the other end. (Some day I’ll write a blog post on how we built this…. it’s still a work in progress in our tinkering process.) And now this pneumatic ping pong is on my list of possible future projects…

This next video shows an exhibit with 100 compasses mounted on a lazy susan with a magnet suspended above… watch how the compass needles respond to the magnet:

This video shows a marble elevator. You turn the crank and the marbles go uphill, then roll down ramps. Like so many other exhibits, this and the compass exhibit show the melding between beautiful art – their woodworking is fabulous – and interactive experience.

But wait… there’s more.

They do have plenty of art on the walls, like GIANT TASKS / tiny people, which are quite nice. I’m a very kinesthetic, non-visual person, so I confess that I spent more time with the hands-on interactive items.

The joy of this place is when you see something and think: “that doesn’t look like much of anything”, your next thought is “hmmm…. maybe I should interact with it and see what it does.” On the left below, you’ll see a table that’s perfectly lovely, but a bit dull. But then when you spin it, you see wave patterns form inside it – see middle photo – you can click on the photos to see them full screen. (On their blog, Swirl is “a stand-alone sculpture featuring rheoscopic fluid under glass, [which] evokes air and ocean currents.”)

There’s also a picture with colored glass tiles in it, which again is lovely enough, but a little dull. But the video shows what happens when you wave a hand in front of it.

Here’s some more photos of other exhibits to inspire you to travel up to learn what they do! (Click on the pictures to see a full screen version.)

Learn more:

There are more details about some of their exhibits in their blog archives: http://mindportexhibits.blogspot.com/, which also include some interesting long articles on the nature of things like science education (STEAHM… putting the Arts and Humanities into STEP education) and insights into the training and mindset of a tinkerer / inventor / maker: director Kevin Jones.

I enjoyed the place so much, I wanted to give them more money on the way out, but they didn’t have a donations box. When I got home, I looked at their website for a “donate here” button, but they didn’t have one. I did find a note in their blog archives that they are not a registered non-profit. But I would still be happy to contribute more to their work, and would suggest that they offer an easy opportunity to pay more than $2. I don’t know how many people would do it, but there’s probably other “crazy” people like me who would.

The trip to Bellingham

Overall, it’s a nice day-trip from the Seattle area. It’s well worth the 80 minute drive we did from Kirkland. It’s not an “all day” activity. Our family spent a little over two hours there and were actively engaged the whole time, but had explored it all by the end of that time. But since it’s so cheap, even if you just dropped by for an hour, there’s plenty more to explore in downtown Bellingham. I’d recommend it for children and adults, and particularly for students of my Family Inventors class. (Note: it’s great for age 4 on up. 3 year olds would likely do OK, but probably not worth a road trip if you have a toddler)

MIndport doesn’t open till noon on Fridays (and isn’t open at all on Mondays and Tuesdays, FYI), so we had a lunch beforehand at Mount Bakery a block away. The brie, apple, and pear crepe was fabulous, and they had great service. Our waitress saw that our son was really hungry, and brought his food out early, but held it up high where he couldn’t see and mouthed to us: “OK to give this to him now?” I appreciated having the chance to give the idea a thumbs up.

After Mindport, we stopped by the Comics Place, across the street, and picked up a comic book for our son to read in the car on the way home. There’s also lots of used book stores nearby, if you prefer.

On our next road trip to Bellingham, we look forward to a quiet morning exploring the FIG (Family Interactive Gallery) at Whatcom Museum, then a loud and exciting afternoon at the MegaZapper electrical show at the Spark Museum of Electrical Invention – only held on Saturdays and Sundays. (We LOVE the Theater of Electricity at the Boston Museum of Science.) We also plan to return to Mindport someday – I want to play with the ball wall some more!

Are your classes gender inclusive?

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If you teach classes for children, what do you do to ensure that all genders feel welcome?

Many parents have had the experience of taking their child to a class that felt very biased toward girls or toward boys. (Read about my experience in my son’s dance class.) Some parents and kids stick it out even when all the messages say “you don’t belong here.” But many will drop out, looking for somewhere that they feel like they belong. What can teachers and administrators do to welcome all genders**?

Let’s examine some of the ways we can help.

How do you encourage all genders to enroll in your program? Think about:

Your class name: If you name your class “toddlers and tutus”, that pretty much implies it’s a girls-only class. If that’s what you intend, that’s fine. Say so. But if you’d like boys to enroll, think about a name change!
The words in your marketing: Whether it’s on brochures, posters, website, or social media, when you describe your program, do you talk about boys and girls and state that all are welcome?
The pictures in your marketing: Are there boys and girls and gender ambiguous kids? Boys and girls doing things together? If your photos show only girls playing dress-up and only boys climbing on play equipment, it’s easy to infer a gender bias.

How do you make your space welcoming to all genders? Think about:

The environment of your classroom: do pictures show both boys and girls doing a wide variety of activities? Are the colors gender neutral or diverse, or is it all pink ribbons or blue cars? Do you cluster all the “boy activities” in one area, and the “girl activities” in another area. (Cars and blocks here, kitchen and dress-up there.)
Your bathrooms: If you have single occupant bathrooms, are they labelled “boys” and “girls” (or “men” and “women”)? Why? Can’t you just label them both “restroom” or say explicitly “all gender restroom”?

How do you greet children and families into your classes? Think about:

The words you use when talking to parents: I prefer saying “kids” or “children” or “students” which includes everyone. If you want to say “sons” then also say “daughters.” If you say “girls” also say “boys.”
The words you use talking to the children: Instead of calling over the “boys and girls” for an activity, can you call them “kids”? Or even better: “dancers” or “artists” or “inventors” or “everyone ready to play some soccer”? Not only is it gender inclusive, it allows them to take on the identity of a dancer or an artist and so on.
The way you react when a person of the less expected gender joins your program: Definitely welcome the person just as you welcome all others. But DON’T go way overboard in welcoming them, like “Oh, it’s so wonderful to have a girl in this class. I really wish more girls would enroll. I’m so delighted to have a girl.” All that tells them that you think it’s weird that they’re there.
How do you define which gender a child is? Well, the more gender neutral your practice is, the less this matters. But, when you have to guess, it’s fair to go by name, apparent biological sex, and apparent gender presentation. (For example, if you see someone who looks like a biological male, whose name is John, and who’s wearing a Spiderman t-shirt, you can guess boy.) But, if the child or the child’s family tell you the child’s gender, then honor that, even if it’s different from your initial assumption. If John in the Spiderman shirt says “I’m a girl, please say she and her when talking about me”, then do so! You can also invite parents and children to let you know what name they prefer to use, and what pronouns they use.

How do you make sure that daily life in your classroom is inclusive? Pay attention to:

The ways you divide up the group: Do you often go for the “boys on this side” and “girls on this side” way of splitting up the class for small group activities? Try mixing in “kids wearing white here” and “kids wearing blue” or “kids who like dogs best” and “kids who like cats best” and “kids who have birthdays in January through June” and “July through December.” Not only is this gender neutral, it also gets them mixing up a lot more and finding things they have in common with each other. (If we always groups divide into girls and boys, it can become an “us” and “them” mentality where the kids see the differences more than the similarities. We would NEVER divide kids up by race for a game, why is it seen as OK to divide them by gender?)
The books you read: Do they show both boys and girls, men and women, and androgynous folks doing a variety of things? In our Family Inventors’ Lab, we try to make sure that we read books about girls inventing, and boys studying animals, and so on. We’ll talk about Thomas Edison and Marie Curie.
Pay attention to labels: Use firefighter, not fireman. Flight attendant not stewardess.
Minimize stereotyped gender roles: When a group of children is playing house, don’t assume one will be the mother and cook and care for the baby. If children make that assumption, that’s OK but you shouldn’t place that assumption on them. Try not to say “wow – this is a woman astronaut… isn’t it great that women can be astronauts too?” It implies that this is a special case, not an equal opportunity.
Help soften their stereotypes. Around 2, children start defining things as “boy toys and girl toys“, around age 3 or 4, children start defining activities as “boys do this and girls do that” and around 4 to 6 they say “only boys can do this and only girls can do that.” (source) You can remind them that anyone can choose any toy or activity, according to their own personal interests. But, don’t get too distressed by this. Stereotypes and sweeping generalizations is one way that kids make sense of their world.
Adjust your expectations of who will do each activity option: I confess that when I set up our classroom, in my head, I think “what’s my boy activity today.” By that, I really mean: I want to make sure I have an activity that will appeal to those kids who are full of physical energy and really need some big motor release. I need to come up with a new term for that, even in my own head. I’ve never said to anyone else “this is our boy activity” but I need to think of it in other terms myself to reduce my bias.
The way you react to the activities they choose: I still remember a coop preschool my middle child was in 14 years ago… one little boy in the class LOVED to dress up in pretty dresses and high heels and carry purses, and so on. Almost every parent volunteer who saw him do this tried to entice him either to choose different clothes (the firefighter helmet) or to choose a different activity (blocks or cars.) Although none of them said anything negative to him, there was definitely an undercurrent of “you shouldn’t do that.” In this case, the teacher gently modeled for all the parents that it was OK for the boy to do whatever activities he enjoyed.
How do you handle emotions: Are you sympathetic to a girl’s cries, but tell a boy to stop crying? Are you shocked when a girl shows anger, but act as though it’s normal when a boy does? Do you place similar limits on their behavior or do you let boys get away with more, because “boys will be boys.” Do you congratulate both boys and girls for sitting still and paying attention?
How you respond to bullying: If a child is being teased or bullied due to gender issues, be clear that it’s unacceptable in your classroom. But, don’t use this as a reason for punishment, instead use it as a reason to teach.

Check out this article on 6 ways to embrace gender differences and this one on 12 easy steps on the way to gender inclusiveness. Also, read my summary of what the research shows on innate gender differences vs. cultural influence, and on how to support both boys and girls in developing their strengths. If you want to learn more about transgender people, here is a nice overview. And here are pointers for Talking with Children about Gender Identity.

What other ideas do you have for welcoming all genders?

** I want to clarify why I’m saying “all genders” rather than “both genders.” In your classes, the majority of your kids may be cisgender: either girl-bodied-who-identify-as-girls or boy-bodied-who-identify-as-boys. But, you may also have transgender or gender queer or intersex children who don’t quite fit those straightforward binary definitions. Some of those kids won’t figure this out till adulthood, but some have the sense from very early in life that their assigned gender doesn’t fit. They and their families are already having a hard time sorting that out. If they go to a very gendered environment, it makes it even harder to know how they fit in and creates even more gender dysphoria (distress caused by the dissonance between how a person feels about their own identity versus how they are perceived / treated by others). If they are in a more gender neutral, gender inclusive environment, it’s easier for them to feel like the person they are is welcome there. Learn more about gender identity: https://gooddayswithkids.com/2018/05/02/gender-identity/

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More Good Days with Kids

Research, Resources & Realistic Recommendations for Parents of Kids age 1 to 7