Friendship Activities for Middle School
One of the goals of an education is to teach kids about the roles that people play in society. Being a friend counts as one of the most important roles a person takes on during the course of his lifetime. The bonds of friendship among middle school kids do much to help kids in their many levels of development. Teachers of middle school-aged kids can help foster understanding about the role of friendship in people's lives by creating activities featuring friendship as a theme.
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Role of Friendship
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Friendship plays a key role for people throughout their lives. These relationships, which offer people support in times of crisis and help to show a person who he is, start in childhood. For middle school-aged kids, friendship helps foster emotional and moral development, according to the University of Florida. Kids with supportive friends usually report having better attitudes toward school, and they learn many valuable life skills such as how to communicate, to cooperate and how to solve problems. Many activities exist to help middle school-aged kids develop and understand friendship. A multisubject approach helps learning on all levels and appeals to a broad range of learning styles.
Civic Engagement
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Although many of the friends that a middle school-aged child has during the course of her time in school come from her own peers, some of the friendship activities for middle school should be created to foster community friendship development, as well. Visits to a nursing home, writing to pen pals in other states or countries and reading about great friendships in history such as the one between writers J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are activities that help kids to think about friendship in a wider context.
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Art Activities
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Art activities featuring a friendship theme help middle school kids create visuals of what friendship means to them. A number of types of activities exist for this purpose. Collages featuring all of a student's friends provide a simple art project that supports the friendship theme. Additionally, kids can try their hands at drawing portraits of friends, creating storybooks featuring their friends as main characters of the book or they can make videos of their friends. You can tie the art projects into other lessons such as reading by incorporating a friendship art project into the lesson plan. For example, if the kids in class are reading books with a strong friendship component like "The Hunger Games," you might have the kids create a comic book project of one of the scenes in the book in which the friendship between Gale and Katniss or Peeta and Katniss is drawn out in greater detail. Later, during an in class exercise, the kids can talk about the scene and why they felt like it revealed something about friendship.
Classroom Decorating
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The classroom can become part of the friendship curriculum. One simple way to incorporate this lesson into the classroom is by having middle school kids decorate the class bulletin boards. The items used to decorate the boards can come from art projects, photos in the community or book jackets taken from books that feature friendship as one of the themes. To make this an effective part of the lesson, the teacher should plan on having tie-in discussions about what's happening on the bulletin board and how it relates to the friendship theme.
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References
- Book Stove: The 10 Best Story Books for Teens
- Agate Books: Children's Books About Friendship
- Christianity Today: "J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: A Legendary Friendship"
- University of Florida: "The Importance of Friendship in School-Aged Children"; Millie Ferrer-Chancy, Ph.D., et al.; February 2007
- Red Room: "Just Friends: The Role of Friendships in Our Lives"; Lillian B. Rubin
- Discovery Education: Bulletin Board Ideas: Middle School Level
Resources
- Photo Credit friends image by Natalia Pavlova from Fotolia.com
