The Swedish national school curricula for pre-school and for the compulsory school system include an explicit focus on gender issues, connected to aspects such as gender equality and sexuality. The overarching aim is to promote all individuals’ opportunities to express themselves in whatever way they want to, without being hindered by implicit or explicit norms and traditions. My aim with this paper is to discuss how these issues can be incorporated in the teacher education, using a particular course at Södertörn University as my starting point. During this course, the students learn basic facts about how the body works, and the didactics for teaching this to small children. But they also learn about societal and cultural aspects of the body. Parallel to learning for instance about x and y chromosomes they have seminars on gender roles and sexuality, and so on. During the practicum period that is included in the course, the students are to create a lesson where they use a children’s book to talk about different kinds of families, and afterwards reflect upon their experiences in a short written paper. The suggested books are selected based on how they show family constellations that in various ways differ from the nuclear family, but the books also open up for discussions around having two mothers or two fathers, and thus the opportunity to talk about LGBT issues. In my paper I will discuss the experiences students have had when doing this assignment, using the written course papers as the basis for my analysis. The theoretical framework used for analyzing these experiences and examples includes the concepts masculinity, femininity and heteronormativity. The preliminary findings show that the students’ experiences differ considerably from each other, and that the focus on gender and sexuality that is present in the national school curriculum is not uncontroversial among the students or among the supervising teachers out in the schools.The paper is of relevance to Nordic educational research since it raises the issue of how gender and sexuality issues can be incorporated in the teacher education also for teachers for the younger age groups.