So, after you make homemade ice cream or popsicles as a class project, ask a boy and a girl to stand up individually and tell what they learned by the activity. In using maps, girls tend to look for landmarks and boys actually read the directions and calculate distances. On a family trip or school outing, encourage girls to look for directions such as East or West and nudge boys to notice the important landmarks as well as the miles. There is reason to believe that boys simply need more time to develop their verbal and hence reading skills. In Europe, for example, where reading instruction doesn t begin till age 8, there are significantly fewer reading disability problems and placements.
Gender differences make teaching such fun.
One thing that I found and the research supports, is that personality outweighs any sort of gender difference. That is why we find verbal, charming boys who are successful in politics or in sales, and why we have quiet, introspective girls who write poetry or invent cures for cancer. That too, is fascinating, but it is the stuff of another story. She currently prepares future teachers in the School of Education at Charleston Southern University. Both of her TLC books, Beyond Hands On and More Than Pink and Blue deal with the application of brain research on teaching.