Lesson: Building and Maintaining Healthy Friendships
Grade Levels
Kindergarten: Practice ways to meet others, include classmates, and solve simple friendship problems.
Grade 2: Explain and practice strategies for maintaining positive friendships and solving common peer problems.
Learning Objectives
- Identify behaviors that help people begin and maintain positive peer relationships.
- Practice respectful ways to enter play, take turns, disagree, and solve minor conflicts.
- Use words to describe feelings and possible solutions to friendship problems.
Materials
- An age-appropriate picture book about friendship
- Paper and drawing materials
- Simple friendship-situation cards
- Optional puppets or classroom figures for role-play
Before the Lesson
Select a book that represents children respectfully and provides opportunities to discuss friendship, cooperation, inclusion, and problem-solving. Avoid requiring children to disclose personal conflicts or identify classmates as examples.
Lesson Procedure
- Read and discuss: Read the selected friendship book. Pause to ask what characters might be feeling and what choices could help.
- Model: Demonstrate a few practical phrases, such as “Can I play too?”, “Can we take turns?”, “I don't like that,” and “Let's think of another way.”
- Role-play: Students practice short scenarios in pairs or small groups: meeting someone new, joining a game, taking turns, disagreeing about a choice, and repairing a friendship after a problem.
- Kindergarten response: Students draw a picture showing a friendly or cooperative action and explain the picture to a partner or teacher.
- Grade 2 response: Students write a short response to a hypothetical friendship situation, identifying the problem, possible feelings, and one or more respectful solutions.
- Reflect: Invite students to identify strategies they could use in future classroom interactions.
Assessment
Observe whether students can identify an appropriate friendship strategy, use respectful language during role-play, and suggest a workable solution to a hypothetical peer problem.
Differentiation
- Use puppets, picture cards, gestures, and sentence starters for younger learners or students who need communication support.
- Allow students to rehearse with an adult before participating in a group role-play.
- Extend Grade 2 learning by having students compare two possible solutions and explain which one better supports cooperation.
Teacher Note
The original lesson's reading, buddy work, role-play, drawing, writing, and sharing activities have been retained. The emphasis is now on explicit modeling, guided practice, student choice, and safe discussion of hypothetical situations.