The International Day of Friendship is held every year on 30 July.
One of the aims of the International Day of Friendship is to foster a culture of peace through education. It is “based on the recognition of the relevance and importance of friendship as a noble and valuable sentiment in the lives of human beings around the world”.
How will you celebrate friendship in your class?
Here at readilearn, we have a focus on the development of friendship skills.
Resources for teaching friendship skills
Friendship Superheros is a set of printable sheets that give children an opportunity to write about ways in which they show kindness to others by being good friends. Children can list their friendly actions or write about an incident in which they were called upon to be a good friend.
Friendship Superhero Posters is a series of eight posters and a chart heading that supports other resources in the Friendship Superhero suite for use when teaching friendship skills in an early childhood classroom.
The posters present four different friendship statements, each accompanying a girl image and a boy image. The phrases 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.
Friendship Scenarios – Discussion starters presents a range of 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. Ten scenarios are included in the resource.
Friendship Superhero badges support other resources in the Friendship Superhero suite of resources. The badges can be printed and distributed to children as either incentives or rewards for being kind to others.
Friendship Superhero Awards can be printed and distributed to children who show kindness to others.
The 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.
Getting to know you surveys are a great way for teachers and children to get to know each other and help to develop literacy and mathematical skills incidentally. Topics to survey are limited only by your imagination.
The resource includes suggestions for five different surveys to get you started:
- What is your favourite colour?
- How old are you?
- How many letters are in your name?
- How many teeth have you lost?
- How many people are in your family?
It also includes:
- Survey questions to print and display,
- Suggestions for conducting the surveys,
- Additional pages for data collection.
Extend the hand of friendship 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.
How to make a friendship tree provides 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.
Friendship messages is a poster of example friendship messages to give children ideas when writing messages for each other’s friendship trees.
There is also a template for making a friendship tree.
Check out these and others in the friendship skills collection.
Happy International Day of Friendship!
