FRIENDS for life… round 1:

Last week I started the FRIENDS for life program with my practicum class. My SA and I decided to break each session into 3 mini lessons, so last week my lesson consisted of introducing the FRIENDS for life program and completing the first 2 activities of the student workbook.

The lesson itself went quite well. The students were asked to do a think-pair-share regarding what they thought the FRIENDS for life program was about. As expected the majority of guesses had to do with either making friends or keeping friends. Next we focused on activity #1 which involved the students working in pairs asking and answering questions about one another. For the sake of this activity I chose to pair the students up myself (making sure that best friends weren’t together as they would already know all of the answers), which turned into a teachable moment regarding inclusion and working with all students, not only with friends. Next we completed activity #2, creating a FRIENDS for life class code of conduct. The students did a think-pair-share to come up with criteria for our code of conduct which we then wrote into our workbooks. I also took a picture of the whiteboard and will be making a poster to display our criteria each and every time we work on the FRIENDS for life program.

I was a little bit worried about how the class was going to receive the program, as talking about feelings and emotions is not always comfortable for all students, but everyone seemed to be open and willing to learn. Yay!