friendship topic ks2

• Skip to main content
• Skip to primary sidebar
• Skip to footer

Need a resource? Head over to the shop and save 15% off your first purchase! SHOP NOW

• Text Messaging
• Facebook Group
• Search this website

Proud to be Primary

Be inspired, motivate kids, and make a positive impact in your classroom.

3:15 pm By Proud to be Primary Leave a Comment

Friendship Activities and Lessons to Build Classroom Relationships

This post contains affiliate links for your shopping convenience. Any purchases made through one of our links earn us a small commission, at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. All creative ideas and opinions expressed are purely my own. Read our full privacy policy  and  disclosure  for more information.

Teach friendship activities and improve social emotional skills in the classroom with these ideas, such as sharing, taking turns, listening, teamwork, & cooperation.

Friendship Activities and Lessons for K-2

We build relationships with our family, friends, and colleagues every day, and it’s a very natural process for many of us. But for our students, solidifying these skills requires direct instruction.

Teaching friendship skills in the classroom requires making time in our day for thoughtful discussions and community-building activities. Below are various lesson ideas and activity ideas to help build friendship skills in your classroom.

Table of Contents

Why include friendship activities, listening and speaking, sharing and taking turns, how to be a good friend, making friends.

• Including Others & Empathy Activities

Cooperation and Teamwork

Free making friends scavenger hunts, friendship & relationships curriculum, social-emotional learning curriculum, more teaching ideas to build social skills.

For those children in your class who may not have the necessary skills to make and nurture friendships, you will need to help build those skills and provide opportunities to practice them daily.

You should teach children about healthy and friendly relationships for many good reasons. The atmosphere of your classroom will improve when you include friendship activities in your lessons. The relationships between you and your students will flourish. And, looking at the bigger picture, you will make a positive difference in the world.

• Spread kindness in a harsh world – Some children you are entrusted with have come from complex backgrounds. Show and teach them kindness, generosity, loyalty, trust, selflessness, and other traits of friendship. By doing so, you are showing them that your classroom (and other places outside their home life) can be a nice place to be. They will learn that they can be part of growing and spreading love and kindness to others even if their private world isn’t like that.
• The atmosphere of your classroom community – The attitudes and perceptions of the children in your care will gradually improve as each child learns new skills and begins to try them out. You’ll see new friendships between your students begin to grow, and you’ll relate better to your students in return. The friendship activities you use to teach them will have an effect on each person within your class.

Friendship Activities and Lessons

Friendships and good relationships are built on several key concepts and skills. It’s important to address each one in your purposeful lessons on friendship and relationship skills .

Here are some friendship lessons , activities, and ideas of what social skills and character traits to focus on:

Good listening and speaking skills are important for children to learn in healthy relationships. Have children practice these things through role-playing, discussion time (learning not to interrupt, speaking respectfully when it’s your turn), and group projects in which everyone must participate equally.

The ability and willingness to share and take turns are necessary skills for young children to adopt. These skills take practice and time for children to understand, especially in the younger grades (Kindergarten and first grade). They don’t use them naturally due to their stage in emotional development . So help them by repeating and practicing often with friendship activities!

Sharing with friends and peers is important in helping students get along with others unselfishly. Help them by giving them scripts for practicing this important skill . Sometimes, just providing them the words and sentences they can use in a situation requiring them to share is all it takes to empower them to do so.

Read the book Rainbow Fish for an excellent example of how sharing is important when making and keeping friends. Add this to your list of friendship activities!

Children should be able to describe what a friend is. They should be able to demonstrate how to be a good friend through words and actions. Give them the vocabulary and the understanding they need to apply to their own relationships with others.

You can do this by brainstorming ways to be a good friend, sorting good and bad ways to be a friend , and giving them concrete descriptions of ways they can be a good friend.

Sometimes, the act of just trying to make a friend can be intimidating for students. You can teach them that it’s not so scary with friendship activities! By doing so, you give them the tools they need to overcome their anxiety in meeting new people.

Interviews can help them get to know others. So can friendship activities that require them to find people with things in common, such as having kids find things in common during a scavenger hunt ( Grab free ones below ).

As a class, students can brainstorm ways to make new friends or share about the new friends they’ve met over a holiday break or just over the weekend. Read the book Peanut Butter and Cupcake for great examples of ways to make friends and write about it. Find more friendship children’s books to add to your classroom bookshelf.

Including Others & Empathy Activities

Emotional cues and behaviors can show whether someone feels included. Good friends try to pay attention to that. Explain to students how to recognize when they can make another child feel welcome as a friend.

Students must learn the necessary life skills of working with others. This is true whether working with friends or peers in teamwork activities. This skill is important in the classroom and life, so give them plenty of opportunities to practice friendship activities.

Friendship Resources

To start, check out this FREE resource – “Making Friends” scavenger hunts. Two versions are included that work great for helping kids make new friends and get to know others better.

Download a free copy of the scavenger hunts for your lessons by clicking the image below!

The Friendship SEL Curriculum for K-2 and grades 3-5 include 5 lessons and activities to help build empathy, community, and inclusion in your classroom.

Through various thought-provoking lessons, discussions, community-building ideas, and engaging activities…

• Children will learn how to communicate, listen, and speak effectively.
• Children will learn what sharing and taking turns is.
• Children will learn what a friend is and demonstrate how to be a good friend.
• Children will learn how to make friends and make new friends.
• Children will learn how to cooperate and demonstrate teamwork.

The mind + heart Social Emotional Learning Curriculum includes 8 units. They include 5+ detailed, character education, research-based lessons filled with hands-on, fun activities. Use the curriculum to encourage children to express themselves and build important emotional and social skills.

Teaching Empathy

friendship skills in elementary

Children’s Books About Friendship

PIN for Later

FREE Social Emotional Learning Email Series

Sign up for the social emotional learning email course filled with tips to get you started, lesson and activity ideas, PLUS tons of FREE resources you can access right away. Everything you need to teach social skills and emotional literacy in the classroom!

Success! Now check your email to confirm your subscription. Stay tuned for the social-emotional learning email series coming your way soon! -Elyse

There was an error submitting your subscription. Please try again.

I'd like to receive the free email course.

You may also enjoy these posts:

Reader Interactions

Leave a comment cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Shop Our Site
• Social-Emotional learning
• Classroom Management
• Teaching Ideas
• Directed Drawing
• Best-Sellers
• Social-Emotional Learning
• Sight Words
• Non-Fiction

Join more than 100,000 proud primary teachers!

Sign up for exclusive access to teacher freebies & weekly emails filled with teacher tips, lesson ideas, and resource suggestions sent straight to your inbox!

• Teach Early Years
• Teach Primary
• Teach Secondary

• New for Schools

Home > Learning Resources

5 friendship and emotions intervention ideas

• Subject: Ace-Classroom-Support
• Date Posted: 22 April 2020

Share this:

Use these clever activities to help children manage their relationships

Every day, in almost every primary classroom across the UK, children are extracted from main lessons to top up their knowledge and plug gaps that have appeared or grown. These interventions are essential for getting children who have fallen behind back in line with their peers, but are often hurried, snatched moments of microteaching, carried out with less planning than the main lesson. The following ideas are based around social skills and helping children with friendships, teamwork and managing emotions. Some ideas are tailored for individuals, while others are perfect for group work.

Friendship rings

Use friendship rings to help children establish how they operate with their friends. Create a simple template of a circle with three or four outer rings and copy enough for everyone in your group, plus one for the adult (I have a batch of these on standby). Ask the children to write their name or draw themselves in the middle. On the next ring out, ask them to write in up to five names of the children they are closest to. Talk to them about how they have chosen them and why.

Fill up the rings, working outward. Now choose one person from the innermost ring and ask about a time that they have fallen out. Where would they be put then? Explain that friendship is ever-changing and ever-moving, and although they have written the names down here now, this might change. It doesn’t matter that friendships change; the child is still at the centre and controls who they are closest to on that page.

Echo skills

In a circle, give each child a square of origami paper (or A4 paper cut into a square). Explain that you will make an origami shape together, but there are two clear rules: firstly, there is to be no speaking. Secondly, you can only do what the person on the left does.

Now make an origami model (you’ll need to make one beforehand a few times so that you feel confident enough to lead the activity). Take your time, ensuring that each stage is perfectly replicated by the person on your left, their left, and so on. This may seem bizarre, but it actually works more effectively than you carrying out a stage of folding, and then everyone repeating it at the same time. Encourage silence and careful visual following instead.

At the end, you should end up with the same shape (with an acceptable variance in quality). What did everyone learn from the process? Ask them to explain this as fully as possible. This activity demonstrates very clearly both the need to follow instructions from others carefully and how we can learn from each other.

Collect together several groups of photographs. Your base set should be a series of faces showing a range of emotions. Collect another set of images that could relate to feelings. Weather types are perfect for this, such as a stormy night, a sunny day, rain on a window.

You can now opt for one of several activities: match the emotion to the weather type, describe the weather type as an emotion or rate the emotions from happy to sad. The key with all the activities is the dialogue that is generated by the discussions. This is often very rich and enabling for children who struggle to explain how they are feeling. This activity will bring a whole new dimension to children’s visual literacy, as well as linking to other topics with ease.

Thought park

This is an ongoing intervention for children who find it hard to explain their feelings. Search online for a child-friendly theme park map with pictures of the rides. Show the map to the children and talk about the rollercoaster of a day you’ve had so far (got locked out, found a treat in your pigeonhole, forgot to mark last night’s books). Explain that if your day was a ride on that map, you feel that it would be most like the rollercoaster, because of all the highs and lows you’ve had so far.

Have the children study the map and explain how they are like one of the rides, and why. The explanation is the key point here – this activity should help to unpick exactly how they are feeling, if not how they got there at the start. Finally, explain that although sometimes they have to go on certain rides, there is a lot of level time in between – life isn’t all highs and lows.

Fizzy can angry

This activity was used to help one child who had sudden outbursts but was unable to pinpoint exactly why they had exploded in such a fashion after something so seemingly trivial. Hold a can of carbonated drink and ask the child what would happen if you opened it. They should be able to explain that the can would fizz a little and be pourable straight away. Now explain that you might have had a bad journey into work (shake the can a little), that you slipped over in the toilets (shake), dropped your bag (shake), and then had a maths lesson that made you nervous because it was a new topic to teach (put the can on your nervous, shaking leg).

Ask the child what might happen if you opened the can now. Highlight that it looks no different from the outside. Is that how they feel sometimes? Develop a way for the child to indicate when their can has been shaken up and explain that it is okay to feel shaken, but that they mustn’t open the can until the contents have settled. At the end of the day, open the can with them, showing that it has settled once more.

This is an extract from Stephen Lockyer’s new book 100 Ideas for Primary Teachers: Interventions (£14.99, Bloomsbury Education).

You may also be interested in...

• Download your free digital copy of the brand new January issue of Teach Primary now
• Teach Primary Awards 2019 Finalists Announced
• Oxford University Press celebrate double victory
• Free resources for teaching film in primary schools
• National Curriculum Key Stage 2 assessments reveal increased attainment in primaries

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy & Cookies Policy.

Tried & Tested

Power Maths – A Child-Centred, ‘Can-Do’ Mastery Teaching Programme for KS1 and KS2

Category: Maths

Fit To Dance Schools From Disney On Ice

Category: Other

‘S!ng Sensational’ And ‘A King Is Born’ – Two Fun New Musical Masterpieces That Children Will Love

Category: Music

Product review: Schofield & Sims Fractions, Decimals & Percentages

See all Tried & Tested products

Recommended for you...

£150m of funds for PE – how will you spend it?

Collaboration can be wonderful, but not every teacher has selfless motives

Creative contexts for history lessons

We Need To Develop Our Own Mastery Curriculums

Follow us on Twitter @teachprimary :

Share teach primary:.

Home | Tried & Tested | Interactive | Book Reviews | Resources | News | Hot Products | Advertising Contact Us | Primary Resources | Primary Teaching Resources | Privacy Policy

Copyright 2024 Artichoke Media Ltd

Registered in England and Wales No 14769147 | Registered Office Address: Jubilee House, 92 Lincoln Road, Peterborough, PE1 2SN

• CODING (KS1-KS2)
• HEALTH & RELATIONSHIPS (KS1-KS2)
• STEM CONNECT (KS1-KS3)
• AUGMENTED REALITY (KS1-KS2)
• DOODLE LEARNING (EYFS-KS3)
• ESPRESSO (EYFS-KS2)
• SUCCESS WEBINARS
• SCHOOL SUCCESS STORIES
• YOUR SCHOOL SUCCESS ADVISORS
• TRY FOR FREE

Healthy and happy friendships

TOPIC OVERVIEW

Getting along and understanding changing friendships.

This topic explores friendships: their importance, what being a good friend means, and how to keep friendships positive and healthy. Pupils investigate their own values and identity (including their online identity), and develop skills to resolve difficulties within friendships, including maintaining and respecting personal boundaries and safe touch, managing peer pressure and the effects on friendships of change.

• Getting along, sharing and turn-taking
• What makes a happy friendship?
• Personal boundaries
• What makes a good friend?
• Personal space
• Qualities of a good friend
• Solving friendship difficulties
• Personal boundaries and permission
• Peer pressure
• Emotional health and well-being
• Personal safety
• Relationships and change
• Wider emotions

Changing friendships, Year 5 video sample.  Archie’s advice addresses how to cope when friendships change.

View sample lesson plan »

View all topics in the programme »

Everything you need to deliver the primary RSHE curriculum objectives - all in one place! Get an instant quote and order online today:

Are you new to Discovery Education?

I’m new to Discovery Education

My School uses Discovery Education

A Blog About Parenting: Coping Skills, Behavior Management and Special Needs

25 Fun Friendship Activities for Kids (Printable PDF)

Friendship Activities for Kids: in this post, you will find 25 fun activities to use at home or to add to your friendship lesson plan. You will be able to download a free printable friendship activity PDF .

Friendship is one of the most valuable gifts in the world. To have good friends and to be one is one of the most rewarding experiences in human life.

Friendship is also one of our most important needs.

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs , aside from food, water, and shelter, having a group of people that love and support you is extremely important. 

Why Having Friends is Important

Friends are people who know and like each other. Friends spend time together, talk, play, and help each other. True friends make you feel good and trustworthy. 

There are so many benefits that support the importance of friendship, it’s hard to list them all! 

Friendship can:

• Increase your feeling of belonging. A tight circle of friends can become a person’s tribe or community that gives them a place to belong. 
• Boost happiness. Close friends have the ability to bring joy in any context. 
• Reduce stress. Knowing you have a loyal friend can help calm you as well as provide a non-judgemental sounding board to help brainstorm ideas. 
• Provide support through challenges. Whether a person is going through a divorce, a family death, or a global pandemic, friends can provide support to each other in a variety of ways. 

In early childhood, establishing friendships is already an important developmental milestone .

“Children who enjoy close friendships are more likely to experience higher levels of happiness, life satisfaction, and  self-esteem and less likely to be lonely, depressed or victimized” (Holder, Mark & Coleman, Ben. (2015))  

(Disclosure: We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. There may also be other affiliate links in this post. You can also read our Disclosure & Disclaimer policy here )  

What makes a good friend? 

What are the qualities of a good friend?

There are many qualities of a good friend. Some of the most valued characteristics in a friend are being:

There are a lot of ways to help kids understand how to be and have amazing friends. Here are a few of my favorite friendship activities…

Fun Friendship Activities for Kids

Let’s explore a list of friendship activities that will help kids navigate social situations and have fun with friends (most of them make great team building activities too)

1. Write a Story Together

Organize kids in small groups or pairs and ask them to cooperate in writing a story together.

2. Make a Video!

Organize the kids in small groups and ask each of them to explain what being friends means to them. Make a video and share it with the class. 

3. Friendship Picture Books

I believe children’s books are one of the best ways to teach younger children about values and emotions.

These are some examples of books about friendship :

• Kindness is Cooler, Mrs. Ruler Book   Written for children ages 5-10, this book helps guide the conversation with elementary school-age kids on the importance of being kind. With thousands of positive reviews, this book is an excellent tool for encouraging friendship. 
• Teach your dragon to make friends   A book about the importance of friendship and how to make new friends (up to 8 y.o)

4. Ball Toss 

This is a warm-up activity to help students explore the qualities of healthy relationships. Have the students stand up behind their desks or in a circle at the front of the room. 

Toss the ball to someone in the group, and ask them to call out a word that represents qualities of a healthy relationship (for example; trust, supportive, kind, fun…). 

Ask that person to then toss the ball to someone else. Each time a new student catches the ball, ask them to share a new quality… and so on. 

If you feel your students may get stuck or run out of ideas, there is also thumball version that includes the conversation prompts on the ball (and wherever your thumb is placed on the ball, that’s the question you need to answer).

These are a couple of examples: elementary icebreakers and group starter thumball

5. Friendship Want Ad

Create a fun friendship want ad where the kids write out all of the qualities that they want in a best friend and draw a picture.

6. Friendship Spotlight Game

Let’s put some common behaviors under the friendship spotlight.

In our (free) friendship spotlight worksheet you will find 15 different scenarios. Ask your kids or students to label those situations as:

• unhealthy/bad signs in a friendship (red light)
• warning signs (yellow light)
• healthy/good signs (green light)

You can also create your own list of scenarios and use the blank page for the kids to have their say (red, yellow, or green)

Grab this free friendship worksheet at the end of the post 👍

7. Blindfold Obstacle Game

Create a safe obstacle course. Kids partner up so that one goes through the obstacle course blindfolded and the other leads with their voice. This fun activity is not just a friendship game but it also helps practice good listening skills.

8. Things We Have In Common

This friendship activity is a great activity for breaking down barriers.

Kids are organized in small groups, ideally with a mix of kids that they aren’t already friends with. The group has to find a certain number of things that they all have in common.

Kids not only learn a lot about each other but become aware of how many things they may have in common with kids from different social groups.

9. Face Time / Exploring Emotions

Have the kids cut out pictures from magazines and label what the person is feeling.

Learning to identify other people’s emotions will help them become better friends. 

10. Telephone Game

This is a classic game and a perfect activity for circle time.

One of the kids whispers a message to the next person sitting next to them. And the message continues circulating until it reaches the last kid in the circle. The final message often doesn’t have anything to do with the initial one.

How can we put this game to good use?

Let’s think gossip. We have to be very careful with what we say because messages change as each person adds something new to them.

11. Create a Friendship Flower Garden

Ask your child or students to draw a flower with big petals (or use a coloring worksheet, there are lots of them online). Write a characteristic of a good friend onto each petal and color them.

After coloring in their flower, the kids can hang up their flowers to create a ‘friendship garden’. You can also glue them to a popsicle stick and “plant” a friendship garden.

Another option is to use flower foam shapes (like in the picture). Write a child’s name in the middle of the flower and then used the petals to write adjectives that described why that person is a good friend.

12. A Recipe for Friendship

Another fun way to frame a conversation about social skills is to organize a “Recipe for Friendship” activity.

The characteristics of a good friend can form the ingredients. Then you may like to ask your students what a good friendship looks like, and encourage students to use their descriptions in their recipe instructions.

13. Build a Tower

Teamwork activities are a great way to help kids develop their interpersonal and friendship skills.

In this case, we are proposing building a tower. And, there are several “build a tower” activity ideas that we could implement: 

• the classic wooden blocks stack games
• suspend family game
• magnetic building tiles  (I find this one works well with young children because the magnetic tiles help their tower’s stability)
• card tower-> with a twist: the tower of self-esteem

The first three options are great options not just as a team activity, but they also help develop creative thinking and imagination, as well as fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.

The last one (the tower of self-esteem) ticks the same boxes as the rest of the tower games, but it provides children with an opportunity to work on self-esteem , social skills , conversation skills , and emotional intelligence .

14. Friendship Bracelets

Friendship bracelets are (usually) handmade bracelets given to a person as a symbol of friendship.

There are plenty of friendship bracelet kits available in the market like this one . 

15. Friendship Word Search

Take this opportunity to teach kids some common strategies:

• go from right to left to see if you spot any word, and then continue with other directions (right-left, top-down, down-top, diagonal)
• choose the first letter from a word and scan to see if you can find the word

Find all the hidden friendship words in this friendship word search. We have provided a list of the hidden words, but you can hide it for the older kids (free download at the end of this post – solution included)

16. Friendship Letter

Ask your kids or students to write a letter to a friend to say what they appreciate about them.

17. Act it out: Friendship Role Play 

Acting out is a fun activity that will help kids reflect on appropriate interactions with others and how our actions affect others.

• Have two kids stand in front of the group or in the middle of the circle during circle time.
• Ask them to act out different scenarios that display good friendship or even bad friendship behaviors
• Take turns with different kids so that they all have a chance to practice their friendship skills

18. Friendship Yarn Circle

This friendship game is a great idea to help kids visualize how friendship interconnects us.

It is a fun and simple activity for all ages and works even for a large group.

• Have everyone stand in a circle with the first person holding a ball of yarn.
• When a kid tosses the ball to someone else, they have to say something that they like about the catcher (every kid holds onto their yarn piece)
• It continues until all the kids have got a chance to toss the yarn and got chosen. 

In the end, you will have a beautiful visual display of how friendship connects everyone. 

19. Play Friendship Board Games 

Board games encourage turn-taking and cheering each other on.

Most board games will make great friendship activities, but if you are looking for a game that explores specifically friendship skills, this is a good option: 

• Social Skills Group Activities

This game is comprised of six different boards, and one of them deals with “What Makes a Good Friend”. This is a great game to encourage children’s conflict resolution , group work, and develop strong social skills.

20. Give them a Challenge

Sometimes, the best activity to help develop a friendship is to complete a challenge together.

Whether it is building some furniture flatpack, solving a riddle, or doing a puzzle together, there are plenty of ways to help kids develop friendships through problem-solving. 

21. Kindness Challenge

This challenge is slightly different to the previous one.

Choose a month and set a Kindness Challenge so that kids are motivated to random acts of kindness.

In our post about empathy activities for kids , you will be able to explore fun activities for your kids or students and download a fun kindness challenge.

22. Friendship Rocks

Paint a gratitude rock and give it to someone special as a token of friendship.

Related: How to prepare gratitude rocks (and 8 fun ideas on how to use them)

23. Friendship Scavenger Hunt

A scavenger hunt is another all-time favorite with kids (and adults!), so we just had to include it in our list.

Prepare a list of nice friendship qualities like:

• awesome helper
• good listener
• great friend
• new friendship

Write down as many items as kids in your classroom. The rule is that names can’t be repeated in each item, so everybody gets a kind word. 

24. Friendship Songs

Adding music to a message makes it more “sticky”. I often find myself humming songs when a word that is part of the lyrics comes to my mind.

So, let’s add a couple of friendship songs examples to our list.

For young children you may try:

• You’ve got a friend in me (Toy Story)
• That’s what friends are for (The Vulture Song-From “The Jungle Book”/Sing-Along)

Older kids may prefer these ones: 

• Count on Me (Bruno Mars)
• True Friends (Hannah Montana)

25. Friendship Videos

There are great resources online to teach kids about friendship.

These are some of my favorites

• For younger children, Elmo and Rosita teach friendship values (sharing, doing funny things together and the fact that we can be friends and we don’t need to like the same things):

• For older children, I love the ScoobyDoo video on how to be a good friend. 

This video highlights some friendship values and how to spot good friends. Friends…

• Do things together
• Care about each other
• Have fun doing silly things
• Make you feel good
• Stand up for each other

We used this video one as part of a friendship activity at my son’s school and we loved it.

Other Social Skills Resources

• I-Statement Worksheets
• Self-Introduction for Kids (Worksheets)
• Social Skills Activities for Kids
• Conversation Starters for Kids
• Listening Games and Activities
• Apology Worksheets and Activities
• Conflict Resolution Activities for Kids
• How to Teach Kids to Take Turns

Friendship Worksheets (Printable PDF)

Did you enjoy these friendship activities for kids?

Don’t forget to download your worksheets⇓

Your printable friendship worksheet includes the following friendship activities:

• Friendship spotlight
• Friendship search work

I like this!

So good thank you!!

I love these activities!

I’m glad to hear that you found my article helpful and appreciate your kind words, dear Anca-Maria.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy .

Sign Up for our FREE Newsletter!

Lesson plans.

• Lesson Templates
• Certificates
• Find Grants
• Fundraising

Search for Resources

You are here

As a teacher and role model for young minds, you can facilitate this important skill by teaching a unit on friendship. You might choose, for example, a lesson plan that focuses on developing socialization skills like: 1. How to identify what characteristics are important in a friend. 2. How to identify what a good friend does. 3. How to practice skills that help people make friends. True friends don’t expect anything in return for your friendship. They like you for who you are and they expect the same in return. Friends offer an excellent way to get rid of stress and depression. The company of our friends makes us forget our sorrows and any unwanted pressure. Plus, we can openly ask our friends for suggestions on how to solve our personal problems and they would be glad to help us out. Friendships can have a major impact on our health and well-being, but it's not always easy to build or maintain friendships. It is important to teach your students the importance of friendships in their lives and what they can do to develop and nurture these friendships. Friendships help children develop emotionally and morally. In interacting with friends, children learn many social skills, such as how to communicate, cooperate, and solve problems.

Coloring Pages

Copyright © 2001 - 2024 TeacherPlanet.com ®. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement and Disclaimer Notice

Sign up for our free weekly newsletter and receive

top education news, lesson ideas, teaching tips, and more!

No thanks, I don't need to stay current on what works in education!

To show the value of true friendship

by Jan Edmunds

Suitable for Key Stage 2

To show the true value of friendship.

Preparation and materials

Very little preparation is needed:

• Write each letter of the word ‘Friends’ on to seven large pieces of card. These can be assembled as the poem is read.
•  An OHP will enable the children to follow as you read.

If appropriate, there may be an opportunity here to refer to the school’s anti-bullying policy.

Introduce the subject by suggesting that if you asked the children to tell you one of the things they liked doing best of all, it would be playing with their friends. Ask individuals if they have a best friend and invite them to tell you what they feel is special about them. (Allow a short time for discussion.) Some children might mention their pets.

• Suggest how lucky we all are to have friends and how sad and lonely life would be without them.
• Invite seven children to come out and help you. Give each one the letter cards, making sure they are standing in the correct order. Ask them to hold up their card when you call out the letter.

F is for faithful; they’re loyal to the end. R is for reliable; they’re true and don’t pretend. I is for the interest in sharing thoughts with you. E is for enjoyment whatever you might do. N is for neighbourly; they’re kind in every way. D is for dependable on every single day. S is for that special friend you know is always there, The one who makes you happy and you know will always care.

• Take a few moments of general discussion to make sure the children understand the poem. Gather up the cards and ask your helpers to sit down. You could prop or pin the cards up so that they are still visible.

There were once four men who regularly helped and took care of their friend who had been paralysed and unable to walk for many years. They had heard about a man called Jesus who was able to make blind people see, deaf people hear, cure lepers and even raise people from the dead. These men loved their friend and felt convinced that he too could be cured. When they heard that Jesus was teaching nearby, they were determined to find him. They carried their paralysed friend on a mat, secured with ropes, one at each corner, to a house in Capernaum where Jesus was teaching the people about God. There was a huge crowd crammed into the building, listening and hoping to witness some of the miracles for which he was becoming famous. The four friends could get nowhere near. They were very disappointed but were determined to reach Jesus. One of them had a daring idea. In those days most houses had a flat roof that was reached by an outside staircase. The roof was covered with a thick coating of mud on a layer of reeds, so once they were up on the roof, they were able to scrape this away and make a large hole big enough to lower their paralysed friend down, in front of Jesus’ feet.

Jesus was very moved by the trouble that the four men had taken and knew that they had complete faith in his ability to heal their friend. So he said, ‘My friend, your sins are forgiven. Pick up your bed and walk.’ The crowd watched in amazement; some of them had known how ill the man had been. They watched as the feeling came back into the man’s once useless feet and legs, and then he slowly began to get up. He stood up straight, picked up his mat and walked away, thanking Jesus and praising God. Some of Jesus’ enemies who saw what had happened were angry. Jesus knew this but he had wanted to demonstrate that his power to heal was a visible sign that he was indeed the Son of God. It was the loyalty of the friends and the faith that they had in him that encouraged Jesus to perform this miracle.

Time for reflection

Reflection:

Think about the story.

Were there good friends in it?

Think about your friends.

What makes a good friend?

Think about yourself.

Are you a good friend?

Prayer: Dear God

We thank you for our friends and for the happy times we share with them. Help us to be a good friend to them. Teach us how to play fairly and to share. Help us to recognize loneliness in others and show friendliness towards them. We know that you are our friend and will be with us always.

'I'm gonna lay down my sword' ( Come and Praise , 142)

• International
• Topical and themed
• Early years
• Special needs
• Schools directory
• Resources Jobs Schools directory News Search

Friendship resources for EYFS and primary

Australia and new zealand, international schools, tes resources team.

Top lesson ideas and classroom activities to help young learners develop meaningful friendships

Support your early years and primary learners to reflect upon themes of friendship, empathy and working together with this hand-picked selection of thought-provoking resources from the Tes community, with everything from friendship recipe activities to problem resolution posters and positive friendship lessons.

Early years resources

PSHE Friendship Tokens

worksheet-about-friendship

Mud kitchen - friendship recipes

Making Friends - Lucy and Gemma (EYFS/KS1)

Design a 'Friendship Stop'

Kindness Posters

Lower primary resources.

Friendship Booklet

how-to-be-a-good-friend-KS1

Friends and Friendship Poetry and Written Work KS1

Fix the friendship form

Resolving Conflict - KS1

Write about Friends Worksheets KS1

Upper primary resources.

Friendship ELSA Intervention for social skills - 7 sessions

FriendShip Skills: What Makes a Good Friend & Friendship Wrong Choices KS1 KS2 PSHE & SEAL Lesson

Friendship Cycle Poster - Help your students solve friendship issues

Friends cards

Friendship Display

Positive Friendships PSHE Lesson

Friends House Moscow

Supporting quaker work in russia.

At Britain Yearly Meeting (held at Friends House, London in May 2015), Friends House Moscow tried an experiment in connecting three countries together.  Our programme staff, in the office in Moscow, and Alla Soroka of AVP Ukraine, speaking from Odessa, were brought by Skype into the London meeting room for a live discussion with British Friends.

We are fortunate that the technology exists to create such linkages, in a world where understanding people face to face – and answering that of God in everyone – is so important.

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Where you belong

When you need it, adidas originals, run to scroll, adidas alphabounce, alive memory, solutions on-the-go, mumiy troll, travel card, prepare for the magic, movie unlocker, join in the game, threatening world, kaspersky lab, protect your memories, friends branding & communication projects see all works.

We are all friends with each other, and we believe that friendship and business can go together. Our agency is a living proof for this approach.

Friendly teamwork between an agency and its clients translates to long-lasting consumer-brand relationships, and is an extremely effective way of communication.

what do we do

We straddle the line between branding, communication and technology support – constantly integrating the experience from all three areas, in order to put together ideas that will create free media exposure.

We don't just develop creative ideas that communicate a message; our job is to carefully lead the brand through the entire integrated campaign: from strategic support to communication with partners, from launch to promotion to follow-up, engaging customers across all media channels.

• NON-STANDARD

We hold the 3rd place in the creativity rating among Russian agencies.

We've won Effie Awards, with our client becoming company of the year, in 2016.

We've received 2 Cannes Lions and over a hundred other awards.

We are the exclusive creative partner of droga5 NY in Russia.

credentials

Would like to get them?