Spring is in the air

 Allright everybody, sing along after me...Spring is in the air, tra la la da doo de da....

What a perfect time of year to teach plant and human reproduction.  While many newly qualified teachers (NQT's) aka beginning teachers (BT's) shudder at the thought of having to talk about "the birds and the bees" to a class of thirty giggling teenagers with hormones surging (or about to) through their bodies, those who approach this topic with the right attitude and appropriate level of humour ensure that an enjoyable learning experience is had by all.

My survival guide to this topic is...
1) start with plant reproduction and disect a flower
2) plant reproduction has a natural progression on to the next section of the topic, human reproduction
3) before starting human reproduction, have a class brainstorm on the "ground rules"
4) referring to number 3, never reveal any personal information
4) where appropriate, use humour
5) make use of videos starring real people, with real bodies who have real life stories to tell
6) provide your students with correct information so that they can make informed decisions for themselves
7) play the STI game to show how easily infections can be transferred
8) give each of them a raw egg "baby" to mind for a week, they love the experience, have tales to tell and besides, the egg "baby" turns out to be a pretty good contraceptive...yes, really!

The keen bunnies in class will be thrilled to be given the opportunity to use a scalpel and tweezers to dissect a flower, if you teach little terrors blunt the scalpels blades beforehand, they'll never know!  Obviously count them in and out.  Get your students to stick the flower in their book and label it, key words on the board can help the less able ones.

If using scalpels isn't an option for your students, click on the image below for a very cool model of the flower that students can cut, stick and colour.  This was designed by Mike Beester, Edgemead High School.

and the cartoon below always gets a laugh...

 and clear, simple video on the growth of a pollen tube

There is a wonderful though now quite dated book called  Living Things: Certificate of Secondary Education Biology by V. Slaughter and published by Edward Arnold.  The copy that I have dates from 1980. If you can get your hands on a copy of it then do and clasp it firmly. It is a superb book, the drawings, explanations and questions are first rate and it covers all basic aspects of plant and human biology.  Highly, highly recommended. See here for some pdf's from the book, it is available for sale from Amazon for only £2

So on to puberty...I like to show this video produced originally for the NEMO Science Centre from Fonztv. 

It is a 3 minute animation which seems odd initially but certainly gets the message across of the difficult journey through puberty showing the progression from "ugly ducklings" to emerging "beautiful swans"and a paragraph about a person called Chris outlining changes occuring to him/her during puberty, after reading this students discuss and decide if the story related to refers to a Christopher or a Christine. 

Here's a couple of info, colour in and ques sheets from User Friendly Resources.  There are many animations online relevant to male and female reproductive organs, particularly good is the BBC puberty demo and I quite like this animation of the menstrual cycle from The American Medical Association.

The BBC Human Body series, episode titled "Raging teens" has a wonderful true to life account of how teenagers feel and the changes that they undergo during puberty, this is also available to purchase from Amazon This award winning series is presented by The Right Honourable Professor Lord Robert Winston.

So...onto the birds and the bees and what better way to start than with this Mitsubishi car ad.

and that wonderful opening scene from "Look who's talking" featuring the voice of Bruce Willis.
and "The inside story" from Discovery Health which touches on the science of it all. There are clear info and diagrams available to purchase from User Friendly Resources on the start of new life.

It'll be yet another well deserved plug for the BBC as I recommend "An Everyday miracle" which shows the development of a foetus in the womb which culminates with, by far the quietest and seemingly easiest labour that I have ever seen or heard of!

As regards contraceptives, no doubt your local family planning association will be delighted to chat to your students about the different methods of contraceptive available to them. Whenever I teach this topic I issue each student with an egg to mind for the week, they name it, draw a face and hair on it.  As part of the task I suggest that they don't leave the egg unattended and need to find a "babysitter" for it if they're playing sports etc... if possible they keep a diary of what they did with their egg and how easy or difficult the experience was.  Usually they find it a difficult task and a class discussion gets the message across that despite being a difficult task, it would be considerably more so if their egg was a real life baby who cried, needed feeding, nappy changing etc..

Something else that works well for teenagers is having other teenagers through the local family planning association come into school and talk to the students about the difficulties (and they are usually difficulties) that they have had as a result of being a parent during their teenage year.  This banned commerical highlights one of the difficulties of parenting...

The Brook Advisory Centre, UK devised an interactive game called "The Body fluids game", it's pretty straightforward to carry out with a class of students as the starch and iodine solutions required are readily available.  Without question "The Body fluids game" gets the message across as to how easily STI's can be transmitted from one person to another.

Some of you may have heard of the very popular "Grapevine Sex education game" which has now been relaunched as "Sexplanation" from the National Youth Agency (UK)

So I'll conclude with the Johnny condom song this was created in 1997 by the Frank Foundation and features puppets from the Spitting Image crew.

Sing along after me...Johnny condom, Johnny condom...tra la la da doo de da....