They, She, He, Easy as ABC

    For this week’s blog, we watched a video from “Woke Kindergarten”. In the video, the book They, She, He, Easy as ABC by Maya Gonzalez was read. The book goes through the alphabet, talking about children with names that correspond to each letter of the alphabet and the pronouns that they like to use. The book pairs fun colors and pictures to show young children that pronouns, although confusing at times, can be fun and easy to use. Before diving into the meat of the book, I would just like to reflect on the video itself. I think that the person who was reading the book was fantastic. Her upbeat personality really made the video enjoyable, and I found myself diving into their other read alouds to see what other books they read. 

    In regards to the book’s content, I think that the book itself displays the idea of gender orientation beautifully. As someone who would like to go into the early childhood field, something that has always been a concern for me is how to integrate ideas surrounding the LGBTQ+ community in my teachings in a way that does not confuse children, but is informative and inclusive. Young children are obviously very fluid when it comes to ideas; they believe everything that they hear and they are not yet able to discern what they believe versus what others are telling them to believe. So, it has always been a touchy subject to me to bring up these ideas in the classroom because they could very well become confused. Adults even get confused. However, after watching this video, I believe that bringing up the idea of gender orientation in the early childhood classroom does not need to be confusing. Yes, there may still be some confusion on the “why” people don’t like to be called certain pronouns, or whether or not a child feels like they want to be called a certain pronoun, but I think that it is still an important conversation to have and like with all things in early childhood, it is up to the teacher to let the children explore and discover things for themselves, even including gender orientation. Books like this one should continue to be read in the early childhood classroom, and I can say without a doubt that I definitely feel more comfortable having these conversations in my future classroom knowing that there are child-friendly resources that I can use to break it down in a way that is respectful, inclusive, and still easy for children to understand.