What the world needs now — friendship skills

Here in Australia, today 18 March is the National Day of Action Against Bullying and Violence.  Next Monday 21 March sees another three events, all celebrating friendship: Harmony Day , the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and World Down Syndrome Day.

While none of these events have ‘friendship’ in their title, that to me is what it all comes down to: acceptance, kindness and friendship. It is sad to see how difficult it can be to attain on a personal, local, national and international level. We must all do what we can to make the world a happier place through inclusion and respect.

Here at readilearn, friendship skills have always been a focus. We have over twenty resources to support the teaching of friendship skills. They can all be found under the heading ‘Friendship Skills’ in the resources for Character Development.

These are just a few of the readilearn friendship skills lessons and resources:

Busy Bees ABC of friendship is an alphabet of words that can be used to stimulate discussion about what a friend is and what friends do.Each letter has a word and accompanying explanatory statement on its own chart. The entire alphabet is also available on one printable chart. It could be used for a bingo-type card on which children colour the box for each letter as they do something appropriate to the word.

Be friends not bullies provides suggestions for teaching children friendship skills. It teaches them to identify the differences between friendly and unfriendly behaviour, to recognise bullying and to provide strategies for dealing with bullying that they may encounter personally or as an onlooker.

The resource includes:

• a story stimulus with suggestions for presentation and discussion
• follow up activities
• games to play
• a poster to print

Topics for discussion include:

• surprises
• bullying
• being mean
• being friendly
• the responsibility of onlookers or bystanders
• the need to talk to somebody safe.

Extend the hand of friendship suggests ways of helping children develop the all-important skill of making friends.

The resource includes

• three printable posters about friendship
• three printable worksheets that can be personalised with children’s handprints or drawings and individual or class-written acrostic poems
• teaching suggestions.

Friendship Scenarios – Discussion starters presents ten everyday situations that children may encounter and asks them to contemplate and discuss how they would respond in a friendly way using their Friendship Superpower.

Discussion should include:

• feelings – how you would feel and how the others would feel
• responses – friendly actions and solutions
• what you might do if you were in the situation and needed help

Friendship superpower posters is a series of eight posters presenting four different friendship statements, each accompanying a girl image and a boy image. The statements are:

• Friendship is my superpower! Who can I help today?
• Be a Friendship Superhero. Turn the sad to glad.
• Unleash your friendship superpower!
• I am a friendship superhero, spreading smiles wherever I go.

Me and my friends is a great activity for helping children get to know each other. Children interview their friends to find out ways in which they are similar and how they differ from each other.  As children get to know each other, they come to realise that they have some characteristics in common with others, and they have some characteristics that differ. Those characteristics do not make them better or worse. They make them who they are. Getting to know each other helps children develop an appreciation for both our diversity and commonality that we share.

How to make a friendship tree presents instructions for making friendship trees which can be used to help build self-esteem, confidence and friendship skills. Each child makes their own friendship tree which classmates fill with anonymous positive messages of friendship and affirmation.

Remember, these are just a few of our resources for developing friendship skills. You can find all the friendship skills resources here.

They are just some of the

over 500 teaching resources for the first three years of school

Resources beyond worksheets – lessons for teachers made by teachers.

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