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Introduction
Leading on from previous lessons such as ‘All about Me’ this primary tip provides activities that you can use to create new bonds in your class and to reinforce ones already formed. With the new term you may even find you have additional children in your class that you need to integrate. This tip on ‘friends’ should help you bring your class together after the Christmas holidays.
Age: 8+
Aims:
- To review and introduce descriptive vocabulary (face and body vocabulary)
- To emphasize the important of making and having friends.
- To encourage mixing with new people in the class.
Materials:
- Name cards (4 of each)
- Coloured cards
- Coloured pens to decorate
- Computer access (if possible)
- A plastic bag
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Draw a picture
You can concentrate on heads only or do the whole body if you would like to practise this language in which case you might not need so much detail about faces.
- Say and point as you describe yourself to the class. For example ‘I have short dark hair.’ ‘I have green eyes.’ Ask for a volunteer to come to the front and ask them to describe one thing about themselves. Then ask someone else until you have lots of volunteers who have described one thing about themselves to the class.
- Everyone should be able to say or understand:
‘I have long blond hair / short dark hair.’
‘I wear red glasses.’
‘I have a small nose.’
‘I have freckles.’
‘I have blue eyes.’ etc.
- Now tell everyone they can go and sit next to a friend. Be sensitive if necessary about new children or children without friends and intervene to sit them with a friendly child. If you have a group of three it doesn’t matter.
- Instead of drawing a picture of themselves they are now going to draw a picture of their friend. They don’t do this by looking but by listening. They should sit with a book standing upright between them. Learner A has to describe him/herself while learner B draws. Then after a limited time they swap roles.
- These pictures can be displayed under the title My Friend and can be labelled with descriptive sentences such as ‘She has blue eyes’, or ‘He wears glasses’. Depending on the space you have available each person can write one or two sentences to describe their friend.
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Pass it on
Everyone should sit in a circle but if this isn’t possible then you can do the activity group by group.
- The idea is to pass on a friendly gesture and eventually moving onto friendly messages.
- The first could be a gentle hand squeeze. Emphasize that the first person to squeeze too hard will have to come out of the circle.
- When you have been round the circle once you can change the gesture to a ‘thumbs up’.
- The next gesture could be a ‘smile’.
- You can then move on to words using expressions such as ‘You’re great’ and ‘You’re a good friend.’
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Build a game
At primary school age children would if they could spend most of their free time playing with their friends. They love telling each other how games should be played and are often experts on explaining sometimes complicated and often varying rules.
- In their new groups of 4 they must invent a game, modify one they play already or combine two different types of games i.e. a ball game with a board game.
- They have to decide how many players it is for, what the rules are, how you can win, lose or draw and what you need to play.
- They can do this on paper or if you can let your students go on-line there is an interactive version here. They fill in the gaps and can print the final version. It is also a great way for them to learn computing terms such as print, save and cancel. http://www.playgroundfun.org.uk/GameBuilderHtml/SelectTheme.aspx
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Friendship cards
The idea of this activity is to build vocabulary around the topic of ‘friends’ and to allow the children the opportunity to give and receive a present without creating tension or jealously.
- Write the title ‘Friends’ on the board and then display the following words:
- Love
- Friend
- Horrible
- Heart
- Hate
- Like
- Cruel
- Kind
- Gentle
- Enemy
- Nice
- Forever
- The learners must decide together which words shouldn’t be there because they are not about ‘friends’.
- Then elicit short examples using the other 8 words until everyone can understand them. You can check this by asking for a show of hands to vote for correct sentences such as ‘I heart you’ or ‘I love you’.
- Distribute different coloured cards.
- Everyone should choose one word, write it on the card and decorate it.
- Place all the cards into a sack and then at the end of the lesson everyone can take a card from the sack to keep.
- This is all done anonymously so that everyone has a card to give and take.
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Links
- Lots of songs and rhymes about making friends
http://www.theteachersroom.com/friendship.htm
- An on-line matching quiz for adjectives ‘What’s your friend like?’
http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-games-matching-personality.htm
- A printable questionnaire to find out if you are a good friend or not.
http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-print-friends.pdf
- Instructions on how to make / play with folded paper fortune tellers – the last link even has a video you can watch on how to fold your paper.
http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~as0bgr/coot/howto.htm
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/crafts/origami/fortuneteller/
http://nhs.needham.k12.ma.us/cur/howto04/tg/movie.htm
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