Lesson Plans for Teachers

Put Friendship Writing to work in your classroom Friendship writing is a great classroom exercise to promote healthy relationships and teach good character. Students can explore what it is to be a friend, how to treat a friend and how to communicate with a friend. You can use friendship writing activities to teach the concept of friendship to your students in a variety of ways while improving their writing skills at the same time.

FRIENDLY LETTERS: Letter writing is a fundamental method of teaching friendship writing. The student learns the dynamics of writing a good letter in a manner that conveys warmth and interest in the recipient, rather than themselves. --How to write a Friendly Letter—

PEN PALS: Set up a pen pal program for your class. There are a number of pen pal organizations online that students may participate in such as Students of the World and Teachers Corner.

When your students receive their pen pal's names and addresses, begin with an assignment for each student to research the country that their new friend lives in. Then, have them write their first letter, describing their own country, their family and some interesting things about themselves. They should ask a few simple questions of their new friend to invite dialogue.

CREATIVE WRITING: You can use a variety of creative writing techniques to teach your students the art of friendship. Written essays, original poems, and fictional tales are all learning tools that add variety to the subject of friendship.

Have your students use their artistic talents to design a coloring book that tells a story. Each page should have some lines of text describing the tale. Suggest that they may want to use situations that are the opposite of friendship to illuminate why being a good friend is so important. After their coloring book is complete, they can either color it themselves or mass produce it on a photocopier to share with classmates. --Friendship Writing Prompts and Worksheets--

SKITS: Writing and performing in a skit is a multifaceted teaching method. The student learns a new style of writing, because it includes dialogue. When the skit is complete, the writers participate as the actors.

Challenge your students to write a short play using puppets. Have them set up a scenario where one puppet's feelings have been hurt by some bullies at school. Allow the student writers to work through what could be done to correct a bad situation and what it would mean to be a friend. Have them put on a performance for students in a younger grade in your school. Prepare your students to facilitate a question and answer session about friendship with their audience.

TEAM OUTREACH PROJECTS: Divide the class into groups and have them work on a community project solely to help others. Whatever the project is, facilitate a discussion on how they can show friendship. Debrief after the event is through and have each student write about how they showed themselves to be friendly to those that they served.

Idea: take your students on a field trip to visit seniors living in a nursing home. Create homemade greeting cards for the patients. Students write prose in their cards that convey friendship to the people who will be receiving them. Bring a camera with a portable printer along. Take pictures of the students giving a card to each recipient and glue their photo to a spot in the card that has been reserved for that purpose. It will be a wonderful gift as a memento of their visit.  How to Make a Free Greeting Card

Christian Skits--How to Write Them, Where to Find Them Skits can be very effective tools for Christian ministry at every level: adults, youth, children, evangelistic outreach, and tv. Learn how to write your own skit. Find out where you can get Christian skits that have already been written.

Bible Puppet Skits Puppet skits for Bible School and Children’s Ministry.

How to Make a Friendship Salad Great hub by Robin with step-by-step description of a hands-on lesson for the classroom about friendship . After enjoying the salad and stories, have your students write their own!

Sinea Pies is a freelance writer for a popular parenting magazine and a professional blogger. Please feel free to leave a comment or subscribe to her RSS feed to be updated on new hubs and articles that she publishes. Click for more: Sinea's profile