Our Friendship Day

Exploring the concepts of friendship and kindness.

We started the day thinking about how we could be good friends with our classmates. We created a friendship promise and throughout the day we went back to edit it based on what we had learnt.

We used balance scales as a metaphor for friendship to help us understand how we could have positive relationships with our peers.  We explored how friendships need to be balanced, fair and equal. The children explored balancing the scales with different objects and realised how tricky it can be. We then explored the different attributes and qualities we all bring to our friendships and embraced our differences. We discussed that if there is too much of one thing, things can become unbalanced, as we saw with our scales. E.g. anger or bossiness.

We then explored the differences between an okay friend, a good friend and a great friend by sorting actions and behaviours into categories.

We had lots of discussion and conversations in our group about the differences between an ok friend and a great friend.

The children then recognised and reflected on how they behave as a friend and set their own friendship targets.

We created a display of all our targets and committed to being better friends with each other.

We finally developed strategies for solving conflicts. We discussed issues that may arise on the playground or with our friends and how we can deal with them in a constructive way.
The children thought of their own strategies and made checklists to remind them.

We also explored the traffic light strategy. Stop and get ready, talk it out and then pick a solution. We made sure to discuss the best ways to ‘talk it out’.

We also made sure to spend lots of time outside playing games and practising our new skills.