In his video this month, Kieran spoke about friendship in a very similar way that he spoke about community. We were able to make some really nice connections to what we had learned in November and December. His lessons focused on cultivating healthy friendships.
On the very first Tuesday of the month, the students came into the class to find the board was filled with sticky notes with their names on them. They were instructed to take one without look at the names on the back and write something they liked about the person they got. These got stuck to lockers and students could not wait to see what their peers wrote about. They requested to do that again, so it became a weekly activity this month.
To build on that, we did a connection activity. Students sat in a circle and were asked to keep a balloon off the ground without moving their feet. They did ok, but I told them that we needed to find a way to work together a bit better. I introduced to the circle a ball of string. To throw the ball, they had to give a compliment to the person they were passing the string to. This brought up some nice teachable moments on how to receive compliments as well. Once everyone had received a compliment, I brought out the balloon. I asked them how they could now use the connections they had made with their classmates to keep the balloon up together. They still had some failures, but like with any friendship or team, they used communication and trial and error to figure out ways to make it work. In our debrief at the end, they had some really strong ideas about how this reflected friendship. One student noticed that when some people did not do their part, the whole thing crumbled because the strings did not hold tight. Everyone had to contribute for the circle to be a success. How did these kids get so smart!
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