Friendship Lesson

Making friends is so important in the elementary years! Even more important is learning how to keep the friends we make. During this lesson, we talked about reflecting on ourselves to determine if we are being the friend we are looking for in others.

Click here (2nd grade) and here (3rd grade) for links to my Friendship Prezi's. 

Both started with the cutest song ever by Jack Johnson.

For 2nd grade, We read How to Lose All Your Friends by: Nancy Carlson. It helped introduce some behaviors that make others not want to be around us. 

Then, we did an experiment called Pepper Chase.

 

3rd grade went right into making a list of things that make us want/not want to be friends with someone. 

 

 Then we used Cotton vs. Sandpaper

 to help us understand that we want our words/actions to come across to others like cotton instead of sandpaper. We talk about why our clothes are made mostly out of cotton. We try to imagine if our clothes were made out of sandpaper. All of the students gasp when I say that, which opens the opportunity to say that other people react the same way when our words/actions are like sandpaper. Each student keeps their cotton ball as a reminder to treat others in a way that makes them want to be friends with them.

Both grades loved the book Friends to the End for Kids! Who doesn't love a good book filled with funny pictures of animals?

2nd grade's lesson ended with each class making a Friendship Survival Kit to hang in their classroom as a reference for the rest of the year. 

 

Bully B.E.A.N.S.

I love to use Julia Cook's books in counseling!

3rd grade students learned about bullying using Julia Cook's Bully B.E.A.N.S.

  

Of course, I always bring my bag of Bully B.E.A.N.S. with me! After we read the story, we looked at the following poster to see if we could identify all of these things happening in the book. 

Sure enough, it was all in there!

Once we had a good idea of what bullying is, we took a little time to talk about what is not bullying. I have found with students in K-3rd grade, often situations are categorized as bullying when they really are not. We used the following chart to help us understand better (taken from Pinterest):

This chart is left in each classroom as a reference throughout the year. 
For a link to my Anti-Bullying Prezi, click here.

Conflict Resolution

After teaching about bullying, and helping students understand that sometimes we have disagreements with others that are not considered bullying, I figured the next best topic to discuss would be Conflict Resolution. Click on the link to access my  Conflict Resolution Prezi . 

I had this lesson planned long before teaching it. Little did I know, it would fall during the week we celebrated Dr. Seuss! It must have been meant to be!

 

Students loved watching The Zax and seeing how refusing to budge from the way we think can cause problems. 

We talked about different ways to handle conflicts - Soft, Loud, and Think and Share. (This idea came from Pinterest.) Together we decided that the Zax used a Loud way to respond to their conflict.

We watched another quick video from Youtube, studying which way the characters handled their conflict.

Our lesson ended with a chart of different options for responding to conflict, which I left in each classroom as a reference.