About This Lesson
8TH GRADE LESSON PLANS
Lesson 1: Creating a Safe School: Celebrating All (with PPT)
This lesson looks at key criteria that can make students feel safe or unsafe at school, especially those who identify as LGBTQ.
Lesson 2: The World Around Me
This lesson looks at influences on decision-making by analyzing a scenario and the people who impacted their decision including parents, teachers, friends, media, etc.
Lesson 3: Healthy or Unhealthy Relationships
By the end of this lesson, students will be able to: 1. Characterize, in their own opinion, at least one relationship trait as either healthy or unhealthy, 2. Name at least two types of power differential in relationships, as well as their implication for the relationship, and 3. Describe at least two ways in which an unhealthy relationship can become a healthy one.
Lesson 4: Choose Your Words Carefully
This lesson reviews why it can be difficult to talk honestly about one’s feelings when in relationships.
Lesson 5: We Need to Talk (with PPT)
This lesson is about the importance of listening and communicating clearly and students rehearse those skills in pairs with a third students observing and providing feedback.
Lesson 6: Talking without Speaking: The Role of Texting in Relationships (with PPT)
This lesson explores the challenges of communicating clearly solely by text using some examples of when messages can be interpreted in different ways.
Lesson 7: Warning Signs: Understanding Sexual Abuse and Assault
This lesson starts with a trigger warning and a reminder about ground rules before starting with a video clip reviewing the key facts about sexual assault and abuse.
Lesson 8: Birth Control Basics
This lesson provides information about birth control commonly used by teens by breaking it into three categories – long-acting, short-acting and works right now.
Lesson 9: Using Condoms Effectively
By the end of this lesson, students will be able to: 1. Describe correctly, and in order, the steps to using an external condom, and 2. Describe how an internal condom is used.
Lesson 10: STD Basics: Reducing Your Risk
This lesson reviews information about decision-making as it relates to preventing STDs by having students complete a worksheet on prevention and transmission.
Supplement: Breaking Up is Hard to Do
This lesson identifies why a person views relationships the way they do, looks at strategies to end a relationship respectfully, and shares resources to provide support when ending unhealthy relationships.
Supplement: What's Racism Got to Do with It? (with PPT)
Understanding how racism impacts sexual health and wellness - particularly for racialized people - is paramount to providing inclusive and affirming sex education. Sex education has a history of centering white, cisgender, heterosexual people, which can promote harm and/or erasure of everyone else.
Supplement: Pregnancy Basics
This lessons covers early signs of pregnancy, explains how pregnancy tests work and then explores what options are available to the person who is pregnant.
