LifeSkills Handbook Activity 9
This is a single activity session plan from The Lifeskills Handbook. There are 61 activity sessions altogether. The handbook is available from our resources section where you’ll also find downloadable storybooks, books and posters to help you in your work.
LifeSkills Handbook Activity 9
Friendship: Being a Friend
Purpose of activity: To explore how people show their friendship
Life skills: Self-awareness, Critical thinking, Creative thinking, Empathy
Important points: Friendship grows and changes through experiences and sharing feelings. You have to give friendship to receive it.
No materials
Steps:
- Divide the children into pairs
- Give each pair one role play. In each role play, one person is the child and the other a friend who helps. Puppets an also be used for children to develop these role-plays. For example:
- A child falls down and is hurt;
- A child is hungry but is sick and cannot get up;
- A child is alone and wants to play;
- A group of children lost their football and you have one.
- Children practice their role-plays for a few minutes.
- In a circle, the group watches the role-plays. For each role play the group asks how the friend is helping.
- Ask the children to change their roles: this time the person does not help the child but is unfriendly.
Final discussion:
How does a friend behave and how does someone unfriendly behave? Describe a situation when someone behaved in a friendly way to you today and one where they behaved in an unfriendly way? When do people who are NOT friends behave in a friendly way to you (for example when they want something… when they want to change the relationship for some reason). Finish the sentence, ‘A good friend always…
Follow up:
Children can do role plays of actual situations they have faced. They first act out what happened and then they act out what they wish had happened. The group discusses the changes that are needed for the second situation to happen (for example; for a policeman to help a child they find injured or alone.