Hi there! It is September and time to share another great activity theme I will have in my speech therapy bag this month!
As our children are either headed back to school or are beginning school for the first time this month, I like to use activities that promote Friendship. Building friendships as a child can be a scary or anxious process. Some children may be shy and some children may be blessed as being a "social butterfly". Either way, friendships are tricky!
To help make "friendships" less scary and anxious, I have the perfect activities in my speech therapy bag below! Check them out and feel free to check out the affiliated links!
FOR PRESCHOOLERS
With preschoolers, it is not ideal to do sit down activities and talk about making friends. That is just not how they like to learn! So, I like to talk about friendship with reading, imaginative play, and game activities.
I love to read the books Little Blue Truck and Llama Llama Time to Share.
The Little Blue Truck is great for introducing how our friends feel when we are nice to them and if we're not nice to them. Llama Llama Time to Share is great to introduce the importance of sharing and how our friends feel when we do not share.
Imaginative play is also great to address friendships. I like to use whatever the child loves to play with (i.e. cars, farm, doll house, kitchen set, baby dolls, dinosaurs, etc!). To play together, I like to pretend a problem happened (i.e. the horse ran away from the farm, the car broke down, the baby is sick, etc). This creates new ideas and working together to help. Sometimes, we need a garage to fix our car. Don't have one.... let's build one! We need to throw a birthday party? What do we need and who do we invite? There are LOTS and LOTS of ideas, creativity, and imagination while learning to share and being a good friend with this suggestion!
Lastly, all preschoolers love to play games! My favorite are games that promote working as a team. Together, we win or we lose. These games are the best to introduce the concept of game play but also to introduce taking turns. It takes a lot for our preschoolers to learn sharing and taking turns. Taking the winning and losing out of the activity, makes it a little easier for our preschoolers to succeed in taking turns. Here are a few of my favorites!
ELEMENTARY CHILDREN
For elementary aged children, I like to talk about the qualities of being a friend. This promotes descriptive adjective use! I also like to introduce social inferring skills. These skills address those social characteristics, such as body language and situational context, that naturally occur in conversations. Children who do not understand these social characteristics have difficulty succeeding as a communicative partner with other peers.
With elementary students, I like to have the child draw a self portrait of him or herself and listing his or her "good friend" qualities. I then have them draw a picture of one of his or her friends and provide a list of why they like that person as a friend. I also like to read some of the books below about qualities of being a good friend.
Social inferring is tricky to address. I use activities created by other colleagues on TpT to teach what social inferring means and to establish a baseline of understanding this concept. I will introduce books, such as This Book is My Best Friend and Sora's Seashells when a child has begun to show understanding of social inferring. And, as every child enjoys them, I also play games, such as Bubble Talk and PicWits.
Building friendships are hard and can be very scary for some children. If your child is struggling or is nervous about making friends, I hope these activities provide some guidance.
I wish every child a school year full of happiness, kindness, and safety!
Come back next month for another great activity!
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