First Grade is too Early to Learn About the Birds and the Bees…

My son brings home books every week. They are allowed to take out three books. My son often runs to the nonfiction section and picks out three books on the same topic. For weeks he was bringing home books on different bugs and then for weeks after that it was different forms of weather. Later, recipe books. My husband asked him the night before library to please pick books from other sections of the library. He listened and brought home a book on government, a book on Glaciers, and a book on the body. I quickly glanced at the covers and told him to go read the books. He reads independently and I have always been happy he is a good reader until this day…

He was reading The Giant Book of the Body. Which looks like the one below on Amazon for way too much money.

He brings up the book when he is on this page below… Full of questions!

I silently start reading; “New Life. New human life begins when a women and man make love, and a tiny female egg cell joins with an even tinier male sperm cell… The two cells are brought together when the man puts his penis into the women’s vagina, and sperm cells are released and swim up through her womb…” Not to mention the nice illustrations…

Um… Sh##! I was in no way ready to even discuss this topic… I quickly took away the book (called Daddy for advice) and told my son that this is something more for older people to read about and something that happens when you are old and married. We would share more information on this topic with him when he was older. Of course my husband was even more annoyed by this… calling the author a female liberal who thinks five year olds should be taught about sex. He feels the author almost snuck this into the book.

Next step is to take the book to school and show the librararian… which I am pretty positive would not wish to have kindergarten through third graders reading without parent permission.

Another funny little part to this story is that when I told my son I did not want him reading this and then I hid the book, he found the book! I saw him reading it one AM when he thought I was upstairs…

Moral of this story is: Don’t judge a book by the cover! If your child is a good reader, you may want to skim a book before you send them off to read on their own. Even if the book came from a elementary school library!

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