Health Education

Our approach to health education is to address topics as they come up in our daily lives (obviously, since we're unschoolers). With me being pregnant, lots of questions come up, or the kids make comments about the pregnancy that open the way for discussion.

We decided a long time ago to always use the anatomical names for body parts, rather than euphemisms. My family uses terms like 'noodles' and 'monkeys' and that always seemed like it would be confusing to little kids. I've also heard that nicknames for body parts complicates molestation matters (I'd heard of a girl who used the term 'cookie' and tried several times to report molestation to her teacher, but the teacher never took her seriously because she said, 'My uncle ate my cookie.').

Anyway, we'd had plenty of opportunity to use the words for boy parts, but few other words really came up. To be honest, the lack of naming girl parts is due to lingering discomfort on my part, though I'm trying to work through it for the sake of the little girly who'll be joining our family soon.

I ended up buying It's Not the Stork by Robie Harris, and we got How Was I Born by Lennart Nilsson from the library. They've been very educational. We haven't gotten to the part about how babies are actually made, but they're very interested in the anatomy pictures and now know the correct anatomical terms for their body parts and corresponding parts on girls.