Larissa A. Spreng
Puberty is both an exciting and nerve-racking time for adolescents, parents, and teachers. It is essential that children going through these stages of changes have access to information so they can be knowledgeable about their body. This unit focuses on changes that happen during puberty and is not intended to serve as a sexual education unit.
The goal of this unit is to meet a need that is currently not addressed in the New Haven Public Schools curriculum: Puberty Education. My goal is to provide kid-friendly, accurate information on a wide variety of topics that allow students to view the human body through the lens of puberty, including physical changes, biological events, and social issues. And in addition to providing the facts about puberty I hope my students will move beyond the wall of embarrassment that is often but up when students hear words like penis and vagina. By breaking down this wall together my class can talk about the human body as scientists and scholars. Overall, I want students to walk away from my class with a healthy and positive attitude about their bodies because they possess the knowledge of how and why they work the way they do.
Rather than creating a 10-day puberty "talk," I choose to structure this as a unit that would carry itself over the course of 10 weeks. The 7
th
grade curriculum focuses on several human body systems, aside from the reproductive system, which undergo a variety of unique changes during puberty. I believe puberty is a great hook that teachers can use to get students invested in learning about how their body works. They have so many questions about this stage of their life because they are living puberty each and every day.
