There are two sexually transmitted infections that I find students are the most routinely confused about in class: HPV and Herpes. (It doesn’t help that Herpes is referred to medically as the Herpes Simplex Virus, or HSV.) Today I want to talk about HPV: There are so many strains, they do such apparently different things… Read more »
Yesterday’s lesson was an STI game…bingo…or shall I say BINGO!! (Sing it with me now…B…I…N…G…O…and Bingo was his name-o!) Today’s lesson from Teaching Safer Sex is somewhat more staid, but no less important or impactful. Understanding STIs is apparently simple, and yet rampant misinformation plagues the popular conversation. From believing that anal sex carries little… Read more »
I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for games. I’m blowing through the lessons in Game On! faster than any other manual, and I’ve decided I have to pace myself a little tiny bit. But…this game is from Teaching Safer Sex! So I’ve decided it doesn’t really count, even though it’s also included in Game On! … Read more »
Sexuality education covers SO MANY different areas: law, biology, psychology, religion, history…I tend to say that if it’s something humans think about, it probably applies to sex too. As a subject matter to be taught and discussed, however, sexuality is often given a very short shift. Many of the schools I work in only give… Read more »
Someone recently mentioned an activity in Teaching Safer Sex to me that I hadn’t even heard of! Which means, clearly, I haven’t written about enough lessons from this awesome two-volume manual yet. So I’m going to dive deep this week, and maybe next, and maybe even the one after that if I get on a… Read more »
We started off the week with two lessons on anatomy, so why not wrap it up with two Changes, Changes, Changes lessons on vocabulary? I love the alphabet game from yesterday, which you might have been able to tell. This lesson continues the word play by focusing in on the ways that we distract from… Read more »
This week I seem stuck on anatomy. It’s not my usual focus – I prefer the more social and emotional sex ed topics – so it’s probably good for me to focus on the more practical every now and then. Today’s lesson from Changes, Changes, Changes is about anatomy and vocabulary. These topics are inevitably… Read more »
Yesterday’s post was about anatomy – the kind with penises and testicles and ejaculation. So today’s lesson from Changes, Changes, Changes is about another kind of reproductive anatomy: the kind with ovaries and a uterus. This particular lesson just cracks me up. I haven’t actually run through it with a group of middle school students,… Read more »
I’ve been reading through Changes, Changes, Changes recently, and so I want to focus on puberty education this week. When I work with young people, I am always interested to know what they know and what they don’t know. Some groups seem beyond their age, knowledge-wise. They come into the classroom full of information (and… Read more »
This lesson is the one that gave the manual its title: Positive Images. When I first held this manual in my hands, I wasn’t quite sure what the title meant. The subtitle helped me out: Teaching about Contraception and Sexual Health. And then I could piece it together a little more: these lessons are all… Read more »
I love history, the kind of history that offers meaningful, engaging, contextualizing information about something relevant to my current life and culture. I hate the kind of history that has devolved into a list of facts and names that I can’t connect to. I’m glad that there are people out there who enjoy that kind… Read more »
Young people are often more able to talk about safe sex and sexual decisions with their friends than they are their partners. This makes sense for a lot of reasons. Friend groupings tend to segregate by sex from middle through late childhood, as conversations about sex and sexuality start to become more frequent within friend… Read more »
Happy Monday, everyone! This week I’m looking into Positive Images. This manual focuses on contraception, with a specific focus on how people judge contraception and the people who access it. The introduction of the third (and current) edition includes the following: “This edition of Positive Images continues the tradition of creating positive images of contraception and… Read more »
My friends and family are trivia geeks of all flavors. From Star Trek to baseball, they do love the details. Trivial Pursuit was one of the most often games played in my house when I was young. I’ll admit to being a sex trivia geek. So a game called Sex Ed Trivia? Sign me up!… Read more »
Last weekend I was at a huge swing-dance-camping-party that I help host every year, and fell into a conversation with a young woman who wants to get pregnant sometime in the next year. She and her partner are starting small, with education and prenatal vitamins and will get more serious about conception in a few… Read more »
Continuing with our Game On! week, today I’m talking about the fifth game in the manual: Private One: The What, Where, and How of Privacy. Privacy is such an important issue for all people. Learning the art of disclosure is often a life-long process. There are so many ways to go with this topic, I… Read more »
It’s a game week again! I’m almost half way through Game On!, which is both exciting and a little sad. It feels like it’s going to be a good week when I dive into this little manual, looking for something that will engage, educate, and enliven my sex ed classrooms! I have mostly focused on… Read more »
Moving away from Sex Ed in the Digital Age, but staying with our week’s theme on how to encourage intergenerational conversations about sexuality education, we are picking up a lesson from Teaching Safer Sex. Regardless of the age of the participants in this lesson plan, they get to have a really good conversation about responsibility…. Read more »
Following up on yesterday’s post on parenting in the digital age, today’s lesson plan also comes from Sex Ed in the Digital Age. It takes yesterday’s topic and builds on it, engaging parents (and professionals) on a deeper level of analysis of adolescent developmental needs. I love this focus on adolescent needs and how, when,… Read more »
I am away this week, working with the United Nations Population Fund in Zimbabwe to create parent-child communication materials. I’ve posted a little bit about materials for or about parents here in the past, but this week it will be my focus. The lesson today comes from Sex Ed in the Digital Age. It’s an… Read more »
