Friendship

“To have friends you have to be one first” Those were words my mother lived by. I shared these words with my students at the beginning of this topic. I told them we were going to on a journey to learn what makes a good friend and to understand the importance of having friend and being a friend.

Our first lesson introduced the topic of friendship. I read the book Enemy Pie. We discussed the boys relationship at the beginning of the book and at the end of book. We talked about what changed and the cause of that change. One of my students introduced the term “frenemies”. We had a nice long chat about meaning of the words enemy and friend. I tried to get them to understand that the term is an oxymoron and to never think of their friends as their enemies. That led into a nice discussion about the characteristics that a good friend should have. I connected this to character traits in language arts. The lesson ended with the students drawing a web with their best friend and the traits that they like about their friend.

The next lesson we delved into why we might stop being friends with someone. This topic is part of the Health curriculum in our district. As we discussed what may make us stop a friendship , I pointed out that a friendship should never be ended lightly. Students understood that sometimes the poor choices someone makes may result in the loss of a close relationship.

Our final lesson on this topic was watching the video from our great mentor, Alex Rigsby. Afterwards, students worked on Alex’s challenge. They partnered up with someone in the class they didn’t know well. The students shared their goals, then looked for commonalities and differences. Finally, the students wrote about what they learned and included what friendship meant to them.

 As a wrap up activity, students drew posters of the perfect friend including the traits that they would want this friend to have. I challenged the students to think about if they exhibited the traits they were looking for in others.