Synopsis Expand/Collapse Synopsis The YWCA Minneapolis Early Childhood Education's anti-biased and play-based curriculum uses practical and real-life experiences to support teacher learning and practice. With thrilling success in 2016, 94% of infants through preschoolers enrolled in this program were on track with age-appropriate development. This curriculum is flexible enough to accommodate state or local standards while remaining open to children's ideas, interests, and questions. The YWCA Minneapolis Early Childhood Education Department has been providing quality education for forty years, delivering a powerful blend of high-quality, full-time early childhood education, direct service and advocacy for children, from infants through ten-year-olds in partnership with their families.
Synopsis Expand/Collapse Synopsis The YWCA Minneapolis Early Childhood Education's anti-biased and play-based curriculum uses practical and real-life experiences to support teacher learning and practice. With thrilling success in 2016, 94% of infants through preschoolers enrolled in this program were on track with age-appropriate development. This curriculum is flexible enough to accommodate state or local standards while remaining open to children's ideas, interests, and questions. The YWCA Minneapolis Early Childhood Education Department has been providing quality education for forty years, delivering a powerful blend of high-quality, full-time early childhood education, direct service and advocacy for children, from infants through ten-year-olds in partnership with their families.
8 Anti-Bias Activities for the Home & Classroom
Learn Montessori's Continents Map resources, lessons, & variations to keep your preschooler engaged and ignited in geography.
Welcome! This post includes a Montessori Language Lesson Story Sequence. Happy learning!
8 Anti-Bias Activities for the Home & Classroom
Open Hearts, Open Minds: an anti-bias, multicultural curriculum for home and school environments
Colour the heart sticky wall is a fun and easy to set up learning and anti-racism activity for toddlers and preschoolers.
An anti-bias curriculum aims to give all preschoolers a sense of belonging while nurturing respect for diversity. Preschool teachers who use an anti-bias curriculum want all students to feel successful and empowered without being saddled with stereotypes or harmful comments. Turning the theory of no biases and ...
An early childhood education curriculum designed to explore gender stereotypes with children.
Book list of children's books about gender non-conforming and transgender kids. This is a great list of great books about transgender kids.
Learn more about promoting diversity in the preschool classroom with these activities and approaches and why this is important for young children.
This post includes an Anti-Bias Activity for Preschoolers
30+ anti-racism activities for kids that you can do at home or in the classroom to help start the conversation of race and racism.
This post is dedicated to Sara Esther Regalado Moriel. Sara and her husband, Adolfo, will be deeply missed by their friends and loved ones. Sara and Adolfo were parents to […]
Our first Open Studio of the year was (I feel) a great success! Nearly every classroom was represented, and many children were able to share their knowledge of clay not only with parents, but also with siblings and with classmates who they don't usually encounter in the Studio. In preparing for this Open Studio time for families I thought a lot about some of the tendencies that we have when we work with clay around our children, and how they fit in with our work as a Reggio Emilia inspired center. Our knowledge of clay is often guided by an understanding of it as a medium for creating recognizable "things," and we are eager to share this understanding with our children. This is an understandable urge and a beautiful one! But what does this mean for the child on the receiving end? Sometimes it can simply mean joy in the wonderful gifts a parent has shared. Sometimes it can become hard to see the clay for its other possibilities. Sometimes it can feel disempowering when their young hands can't make the perfect shape the way an adult's hand can. All of the teachers at our center are constantly grappling with questions like, "When do I step in to help?", "How can I be supportive without infringing on a child's agency?", and "How can I ask questions to understand a child's mind without imposing my ideas on them?" In thinking about this year's first Open Studio, I really wanted to expand this culture of careful, critical thought, opening it up to parents through some questions and prompts posted on the wall: The issue? How to ensure that parents read them. I agonized over this question beforehand as I was setting up. I planned to point them out to parents as they entered (which I did) but I was not so sure what to do to help them follow through. I wanted to offer them an opportunity to learn a bit more about our work as a center, but I was not comfortable with taking on the forceful approach necessary to make sure everyone read it. However, I knew that this meant that some parents might read these questions at the end, at which point they might feel as though they had done something wrong. "Well," I thought to myself, "This is an experiment I have never tried before, and I won't know how well it will work until it's over." In the end, I decided to try out my initial idea of mentioning the information to parents as they arrived, then seeing what happened. One parent was kind enough to reflect on her experiences surrounding these prompts at Open Studio: I heard you say that there was something I should read on the panels against the window, but I assumed it was documentation about the studio and I planned on reading at the end of my time in the studio. After I'd been in the studio, [my partner] tapped me on the shoulder and told me I should read the stuff on the panels, but I still thought it was just documentation and that I'd read it before I left. At that point I thought it must be really great documentation, but I still didn't know it had anything to do with my opens studios. Even thought I didn't think I needed to read it at that point, I could see it from where I was sitting and started to read it from across the room. As I read it, I was holding a ball of clay that I had just loudly said I would turn into a monkey and I did feel I wanted to rewind and take back all of my references to representational use of clay. I also started to make a concerted effort to think of clay as a sensory activity and engage or prompt [my child] in ways that supported that view of clay. ... So the prompts definitely achieved the goal of deepening my understanding of Reggio, clay, and the studio. My only fear is that if [I hadn't been told] a second time to read the posters, I would have read them at the end and felt like I did the whole thing wrong. I'm really happy to think about Reggio teaching and try new things, so it also would have felt like a lost opportunity. This parent's words are encouraging in that they suggest that parents at our center are willing and interested in engaging with the pedagogical philosophy that runs our school. At the same time, they show me that what I was worried about happening had happened. So, how can I better design an Open Studio that will encourage parents to engage with some of the ideas that drive our center's practice? The parent above suggested the possibility of having my questions as handouts, or of posting them by the door for people to read before even entering the Studio. In addition, she offered the idea of a sort of exit question for parents to respond to via email or this blog later on. Dear parents - Did you attend Open Studio and read these questions? Did they affect your time in the studio? What do you think reading them now? How can I best invite you into our center's pedagogical practice? ........................
This post highlights a preschool geography activity with rocks, matching to landmarks. Geography includes physical and culture. This activity includes both.
Before you know it a new school year will be beginning. We'll be gathering lots of little ones together that don't know each other, haven't played together before, and it's a whole new experience for many of them. As the adult caregivers we have the amazing opportunity to invite all these little people into a new relationship, our classroom family. For some of them, this will be their first play experience with children they haven't known all their lives and learning about each other, how we're alike and different, and how to accept all of it and work together is the beginning of embarking on a new adventure. One of the obvious differences would be appearance: different skin tones, hair colors, eye colors, heights, weights, physical abilities, etc. We display multi-cultural, varying skin tones, different ages, different abilities, and the like through dolls, books, posters, and more. One book we choose to use to demonstrate likenesses and differences is We Are All Alike...We Are All Different by Laura Dwight and a group of kindergarten children. The photographic images and kid-drawn images are appealing and encourage the children to look at themselves and their friends. We then pull out the Crayola Multicultural Washable Paint. They come in 8 colors: Beige, Bronze, Brown, Mahogany, Olive, Peach, Tan, Terra Cotta. I would choose the two colors that I thought were the closest to that child's skin tone, as one color rarely would match. I'd blend the two colors on the back of the child's hand to see if we came up with the right combo. Once we determined the color or color combo that matched that child's skin, we'd mix up a small batch of the color in preparation for their self-portrait. You'd hear them saying, "My skin is beige-bronze." "My skin is peach-tan." Each child then painted their personalized skin-tone on the face outline and we waited for it to dry. Continuing our self-portrait project from the day before, the child looks at him/herself in the mirror determining his/her eye color, then add eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Another look in the mirror determines hair color and we measure yarn to match the length. This little guy has spiky hair on top so we measured it for his portrait, also. LOVE IT!! Here's the end result. Each child's is uniquely his or her likeness. We listed the color or color combo of the skin paint at the bottom of the portraits. We wanted to get the parents involved, so we took photos of each child's hands to see if the parents could identify them. Most parents admitted that it was harder than they thought it would be. These are a couple of many activities you can do to develop and understanding and acceptance of likenesses and differences among the children in a gathering. What kinds of things do you do in your program?
This post is dedicated to Sara Esther Regalado Moriel. Sara and her husband, Adolfo, will be deeply missed by their friends and loved ones. Sara and Adolfo were parents to […]
Learn how to cope with crises and traumatic events in the classroom during COVID-19 with this free professional development.
8 Anti-Bias Activities for the Home & Classroom
This post includes an Anti-Bias Activity for Preschoolers
Discover the best anti-bias children's books and books with social justice themes using my book calendar for ages 3 - 12.
Just a quick reminder that Sharing Saturday and Homemade Mother's Day Gift link parties are still open. Please come linkup with your child-oriented crafts and activities and your great Mother's Day ideas! And of course visit to check out all the wonderful ideas already shared!! This week I'm going to share some multicultural story books Hazel and I have discovered and liked thus far. With one of them we have tried a painting activity, so I will share that with you as well. Some musical resources for this book would be DARIA's song Beautiful Rainbow World (on her Beautiful Rainbow World CD and her I Have a Dream CD) and Kevin So's song Individual (on his Individual CD and Along the Way CD). (I will share more about Kevin So's music at a later date, but Individual goes along with this book, so I'm sharing it here.) So the book with project is The Colors of Us by Karen Katz. This story is about a girl whose mother is an artist and tells her that if she mixes red, yellow, black and white paints in the correct proportion she will get the right shade of brown as her skin. The girl says, but brown is brown. Then they go for a walk and see many different shades of brown in her friends, neighbors and family's skin tones. It is really a lovely story about the different shades of our skins and of course it lends itself to making different shades of skin colors from paint, which is what we did. We mixed red, black, yellow and white to get different shades that could be skin tones. It took some trial and error (and didn't help that we were almost out of red paint). We slowly got some good colors. We tend to have a lot of pink since we were trying to get Hazel's skin tone. Then we expanded out to get more shades. Hazel has an Asian friend at school so we tried to get her color and then tried to get some of the colors mentioned in the book. With each color Hazel made handprints on one page, so we would have a sheet with the different shades of skin tones. Handprints Wet Handprints Dry Another book we have enjoyed is The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson. This story is told from the point of view of a black girl in the South in a town with a fence dividing the blacks and whites. There is a young white girl who sits on the fence each day of the summer watching the black children play. Eventually the girls talk and start sitting on the fence together. It is a nice story of how even when divided children find a way to play together. Another fun book is The Crayon Box That Talked by Shane Derolf. It is a story told by a child who hears the crayons in a box saying they do not like one another. The child buys the box and takes the crayons home and makes a picture showing each color how they work together to make beautiful pictures and then of course the crayons like one another. It is a very cute way to show liking each other's differences. A good book to teach about segregation is White Socks Only by Evelyn Coleman. This is a story that a grandmother tells her young granddaughter about the first time she walked into town by herself. The rule was and is you are only old enough to walk into town by yourself if you are going to do some good. The grandmother as a young girl walked into town with two eggs. She wanted to see if it really got hot enough to fry an egg on cement. After her experiment she saw a water fountain with a sign on it saying "Whites only" and since she knew what that meant, she took off her shoes so she only had her clean white socks on the stool. Of course a white man came and yelled at her and beat her, but many of the black people came and took their shoes off and took a drink as well. I won't ruin the end, but it is a great story about causing a bit of revolution during the time of segregation. Hazel (3) enjoyed this story, but I don't think she really got what was happening and she didn't ask questions, so I didn't take the time at bedtime to explain it. Well that is enough multicultural resources for this week. This is where I link up....
