Girls Rule, Boys Drool??

In first and second grade guidance classes, we're having a long unit on dealing with bothering and bullying. So far, we've covered the ideas of ignoring and walking away, and this week we're focusing on asking the troublemaker to stop. Today, we had a puppet show about Tommy and Susie, who had a conflict in music class and solved it by using I-messages. Later, they met on the playground to practice endurance on the monkey bars. In the puppet show, Susie had been working on her arm strength and was counting how many times she could go back and forth on the bars without taking a break. Tommy thought he could easily beat her because, in his words, he was a big strong boy and she was a wimpy little girl. However, as you can probably guess, Susie beat him because she'd been practicing and he hadn't. The puppet show ended happily, of course, with good sportsmanship and the promise of a continuing friendly competition. After the puppet show was over, a cute blonde girl wearing stylish purple glasses raised her hand and said with a smirk, "That was pretty insulting, calling Susie a wimpy little girl." I laughed and agreed with her but pointed out that Tommy had had to "eat his words" when Susie beat him. At this point in the lesson, we had a short story about asking bothersome people to leave us alone and then we had an informal test about the lesson. At the end of the quiz, I asked the children to tell me what they'd learned. One boy said he'd learned to ignore and walk away when people were being mean. Another said he'd learned to tell people to stop when they gossiped or spread rumors. Noticing the little blonde girl's hand in the air, I asked what she'd learned. With a big old grin, she said, "I learned that girls are better on monkey bars than boys are!" I cracked up. Now this is one little girl who has confidence and gumption galore and doesn't intend to let her gender hold her back!