#SaveSexEd - Puberty For Intermediate Students
Dag, y'all! Intermediate level students have so much to learn about puberty! Real talk, this is a subject I wish the 2015 HPE curriculum had moved to an earlier grade. The average onset age of puberty for youth born with uteruses is around 10 and a half years old. For Black and Lantinx youth, it's even younger than that. The curriculum covers puberty in Grades 4 and 5, and by that time some kids are already going through it. Ideally, I prefer that kids have information about bodily changes before they happen so that understand that it's normal. Furthermore, there's a LOT to learn about puberty: hormones, growth spurts, new and complex emotions, sexual response, periods, vaginal lubrication, erections, ejaculation, pubic hair, acne - and those are just the basics!
All of this to say that you can start talking to your kids about puberty at home before the Ontario curriculum does. If you introduce it earlier, say when they're around 8 years old, you have lots of time to introduce the information gradually over time, and over several conversations. But if you do have to teach puberty in a classroom setting, hopefully, the exercises in the video and the info sheets below will help the lessons land with your students.