The Chains of Friendship

Hello my wonderful readers! I hope everyone is having a great transition back from the winter break and the weather is treating you well wherever you may be! Things have been busy here in my building since we have been back from our break. Throw a snow day into the mix, and we have certainly hit the ground running!


I wanted to take a moment to write about an activity that I did in each of the second grade classrooms right before the break. In second grade, our curriculum is currently focusing on friendship, and what it means to be a good friend. In order to introduce the lesson, I first read "That's What a Friend Is" by P.K. Hallinan. This is a short, rhyming story, about all of the things that friends do together. Then, as a whole group, we talk about some of the other qualities of a friend. After we have a class definition along with some examples of friendship, I explain to the group that we are going to be a making a paper friendship chain.


The directions given to the class go like this. "Each of you is going to get a strip of colored paper with the name of one of your classmates written on it. Make sure you do not tell ANYONE whose name you have. It's a surprise! Once you have your paper, you are going to write what makes that person a good friend on your strip. You can decorate your strip however you want. Then, at the end of class, we are going to read them aloud and create a chain with them."


Before going into the class, I cut different colored strips of construction paper, and  I wrote each students name on a strip. I then passed them out to the class, making sure no student had their own name. I gave the students about 10 minutes to write their sentences and decorate their strips. Then, one by one, each student came up, told the class whose name they had, and what they think makes that person a good friend. Then, I stapled each strip into a chain.


When doing activities like this, I always tend to get a bit nervous, because you never know what a child might come up with. I always try to read each strip before the child reads it aloud to the class to make sure that it is appropriate and kind. The second graders did an awesome job with this and really built their fellow classmates up through this activity. Activities like this are always my favorite, because I truly have the opportunity to see the positive impact that is being made on the children, which ALWAYS makes the more difficult aspects of the job worth it.


Once all of the "Friendship Chains" were complete, I hung them up outside of my office for other students in the school to see. This year was the first time I did this activity, but I will definitely be doing it again! :-)