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Sex education

How can early years practitioners treat boys and girls equally, yet focus on their different needs and strengths to foster learning? <B>Helen Bilton</B> considers the challenges

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus' (Gray, 1993). 'Men have obsessions; women have personalities' (Hornby, 2000). Men single-task, women multi-task. Are these differences between the sexes real or imagined?

Whenever I talk to practitioners and ask if they see any differences between the sexes, I am always given a resounding yes. Distinctions noted include the way they behave, react, approach learning, and think.

Boys tend to see a difference between work and play - one they like, one they are not sure of (Paley, 1984). Girls tend to gravitate towards adults, they appear more settled, they talk, they like to create something with a tangible end product. Boys tend to gravitate away from adults, preferring activities involving high levels of movement and exploration and building on a large scale. But not all boys are as described, nor all girls.

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