As you plan for this month's lesson, the following resources and ideas might be helpful.
Click here for a recording of the meeting. Click here to view the slides in Powerpoint formatting and here for slides in a PDF as you watch the recording.
Click here for the link to the 2016-17 Classroom Champions Planning Manual to find even more resources on Perseverance!
This month's video lesson may contain several big points:
- What Friendship embodies:
- How to choose a friend, and why having friends with similar goals matters
- How to introduce yourself to a new group, or include someone new in your group
- How to manage relationships
- Different ways to demonstrate Friendship
- Exploring Friendship:
- Vocabulary
- Anti Bullying
- Building a Support Team
- Friendship on the Page
- A challenge to the students that may include:
- Spend time with a classmate they don’t normally socialize with
- Show appreciation to their friends
- Look for examples of friendship in literature and film
You may want to prepare for watching the video lesson by:
- Planning for vocabulary development as needed
- Preparing a Frayer model to make Friendship more concrete by creating examples and non-examples of Friendship. Click here to view an example of a Frayer Model.
There will be lots of information that will be helpful in planning this topic below. Please pick and choose what works best for you and your students. Texts will be at the bottom of this blog entry.
Vocabulary Development
Friendship may be a word that your bigs and littles know. Discussing what self awareness, empathy and loyalty can help students to know what they may already be practising in their daily life. Creating a wanted poster advertising for a friend can be a fun way to explore the new words!
Exploring Friendship:
- Friendship is a skill that can be developed and a growth mindset can help students continue to grow into the friendships they develop, especially considering that maintaining relationships goes well into adulthood.
- Using Fair Play is a great way to establish friendship and trust. Here is the link to the Fair Play Blogger to review ideas!
- It can be fun to discuss and explore if friendship is just a human behavior or desire?
Here is a link to a short video of how a billy goat adopted a blind horse on a farm, avoiding the horse being put down. Their behavior demonstrates how animals can be in tune with each other’s needs in a way that crosses species and in surprising ways.
- Using a graphic organizer can help to explore the different kinds of friends we have.
Managing Friendships:
Finding new friends can be intimidating and this is also true when old friends have a disagreement. Below are discussion questions to help students begin to consider their friendships:
- How do you go about settling a disagreement?
- How do you approach creating a new friend?
- How do you react when someone wants to be your friend?
- How can you identify similar interests with someone new?
Many of our Olympic athletes develop friendships despite their competition. Alex Rigsby and Bram Bailey play Women’s Hockey League and Akeem Haynes and Christian Taylor compete in track and field for different countries. How do competitors develop friendships?
Anti Bullying:
Bullying is an aspect that can affect friendships, learning how to navigate healthy and unhealthy friendships and what to do when you witness someone bullying your friend. We love the read aloud One by Kathryn Othoshi, about accepting each other’s differences and how it sometimes just takes one voice to make everyone count. Teachers also recommended the read aloud Zero, exploring value and self-worth.
A fun activity is to challenge your students to go a full week without name calling and discuss what they discover! This activity is based on a book Misfits, but does have a main character who is gay so know your audience.
Other great Friendship Ideas:
- The topic of Friendship is also a great time to explore manners! So many ways to explore how manners change with environments, over time and with locations. Below are some potential discussion questions:
- Are there different manners expected in the cafeteria vs. recess?
- How expected manners are similar and how many are different?
- Are manners cultural?
- What should you do when someone is rude?
2) This is a good time to explore building a support team and recognizing who already is part of their team. Building a support system is something that the mentors know a lot about – and it relates to success with goals. Students might not realize it, but they are part of the mentors’ support teams now.
3) Online Friendships
- More than 80% of students call their CC mentor a friend.
- Connecting with people online is more and more common, at younger and younger ages. How can we help students to learn how to navigate healthy ways of exploring the internet?
- Common Sense Media has endless resources and reviews for sites and online games from teachers and parents, including excellent lesson plans.
Lesson Ideas:
Teacher recommendations:
- Something I was going to share that I did two years ago for Friendship month was "Friendship Friday". Each Friday in the month of February we did some sort of friendship activity. One day they ate lunch with someone different. Another day they played with some new at recess. One day they wrote positive notes to their friends. They also had days of random acts of kindness (giving a student pencils/paper, putting up or taking down someone's chair, helping them with their work, cleaning up a mess that was made, etc.)
- My students loved this and I plan to have "Friendship Friday" again this year. You may share this idea if you don't already have it in the plans and if you think it is worth sharing. I just thought it was something different and kept Friendship month going all month.
- Bucket Filling and Bucket dipping can give students a way to practise showing empathy to each other and to reflect on how to make healthy choices when interacting with each other. How to fill a Bucket by Carol McCloud is a great way to start!
- Create a friendship bench for students to go to when they can't find a friend to play with so when another student see them, they invite them to come and play!
Olympic Values Education Program (OVEP):
CC has been working with the OVEP, and Heatherle was recently trained in the OVEP lessons. She’s put together some resources for everyone about The Olympic Truce, the Olympic Village, and some other topics that show friendship through sport. You might also run a google search of the Youth Olympic Games — the entire function of those games is to promote friendship through sport (Just like the Canada Games started by the first Prime Minister Trudeau!). This link will provide a wealth of resources!
Book Resources: Be sure to check the Planning Manual for more examples!
When exploring books it is always good to explore the text you have already worked with. Consider...
- Analyzing books and stories you have read this year.
- How many fictional pairs/groups can you come up with who have developed or had conflict within their friendships and found resolutions?
- Why are Buddy Stories our favorite books and movies?
For the littles we love the Mo Willems series! Friendship is one of the biggest themes in picture books are early chapter books.
Teacher Recommendations about Friendship:
- Stargirl
Books that explore Manners:
- Are You Quite Polite?
A few interesting resources for you as a learner:
Kids Deserve It- Todd and Adam encourage you to think big and make learning fun and meaningful for students. While you’re at it, you just might rediscover why you became an educator in the first place.
The Undoing Project:A Friendship that Changed Our Minds- The Undoing Project is about the fascinating collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures. They became heroes in the university and on the battlefield—both had important careers in the Israeli military—and their research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind’s view of its own mind.
Video Link to a Tedtalk with the legendary duo Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin have been friends for decades. In a raw, tender and wide-ranging conversation hosted by Pat Mitchell, the three discuss longevity, feminism, the differences between male and female friendship, what it means to live well and women's role in future of our planet. "I don't even know what I would do without my women friends," Fonda says. "I exist because I have my women friends.”
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