LOVE NOTES

Love Notes builds skills and knowledge for healthy and successful relationships for romance, friends, family, school, and work. Love Notes empowers youth with skills needed to further their own personal development, to form and maintain healthy relationships, to make wise sexual decisions, and build their skill capacity to follow through with their intentions.

Overview
Love Notes is designed to be used by an educator for 9th-12th grade students. The goal of this program is to build models and confidence for healthy relationships, improve communication skills, build robust knowledge of dating violence prevention, and understand the benefits of making wise sexual choices and the benefits of sexual delaying. The curriculum is based on numerous principles:

  • Planning—for your future relationships, education, work and family – by learning more about yourself and acquiring relationship skills – by making clear sexual choices that will help you avoid risks – by learning the Success Sequence so you can follow your plan 

  • Pacing—that is pacing your relationship involvements more slowly – so you can make wise decisions today—especially wise sexual decisions—that will give you more choices for the future

  • Preventing—anyone or anything (unintended pregnancy or an STI) from being a barrier to your personal vision


Curriculum
The program is delivered through an activity and media-based approach. In addition to the lesson delivered by an educator, the lively activities use real-life relationship scenarios that are LGBTQ inclusive. Love Notes incorporates popular music, music videos, film, stories, drawing, sculpting, and an anonymous question box. The program consists of 13 Lessons.

Content

The 13 lessons are broken into four sections: Knowing Myself, All About Healthy Relationships, Communication Skills for Healthy Relationships, and Sexual Decision-Making & Pregnancy Prevention. See below for a breakdown of lessons:

Section I: Knowing Myself

  • Lesson 1: Relationships Today

  • Lesson 2: Knowing Yourself

  • Lesson 3: My Expectations—My Future

Section II: All About Healthy Relationships

  • Lesson 4: Attractions and Starting Relationships

  • Lesson 5: Principles of Smart Relationships

  • Lesson 6: Is it a Healthy Relationship?

  • Lesson 7: Dangerous Love

  • Lesson 8: Decide, Don’t Slide—Low Risk Approach to Relationships

Section III: Communication Skills for Healthy Relationships

  • Lesson 9: What’s Communication Got to Do With It?

  • Lesson 10: Communication Challenges and More Skills

Section IV: Sexual Decision-Making & Pregnancy Prevention

  • Lesson 11: Let’s Talk About Sex

  • Lesson 12: Pregnancy, STIs and HIV

  • Lesson 13: Through the Eyes of a Child