Friendship-themed craft activities engage preschoolers' developing fine motor skills while promoting values of friendship. One option is to invite students to create friendship portraits. Each student pairs up with another in the class and the two create a drawing of their partner. After creating the portraits, students share one reason why their partner makes a good friend. A more interactive craft is a "Good Job" bag. Each student decorates a plain brown paper lunch bag with stickers, glitter, paint and other craft items. Help your students write their names on their bags, and then set the bags up inside the room. Encourage fellow students to leave small gifts or notes in the bags of their peers. Notes might compliment a good behavior like sharing a toy or remind the friend of a special event like a play date. Encourage students to leave several notes or tokens in several different bags every week.
Literacy skills like letter recognition and beginner phonics are just developing in the preschool years, so use friendship activities as a way to promote introductory literacy in the classroom. Introduce friendship skills to students through age-appropriate storybooks and whole-class reading activities. Karen Beaumont's "Being Friends" and Eric Carle's "Do You Want To Be My Friend?" are level-appropriate choices for preschool students. During the reading, ask students to share their thoughts on the ideas or events of the book with questions like, "Is this character being a good friend?" Once students have an understanding of the themes, invite them to create their own friendship booklets from folded and stapled pieces of construction paper. The pages might contain drawings of their best friends or vocabulary words related to friendship, like "sharing," "play" and "fun."
Interactive games encourage preschool students to physically interact with one another while developing an understanding of the value of friendships. Matching skills are a benchmark standard in preschool, so create a matching game for students in which they meet new classmates. One option is to give each student one of four different stickers. When you play a song, have students dance around until the music stops and then hurry to find the other students with their stickers. Students then learn their new friends' names and dance in their groups for the rest of the song. To practice identifying similarities, ask one child to volunteer and name one thing you notice about the child, like that he is wearing a red shirt. Have any other students who are wearing red shirts stand up, and select another volunteer from this group. Focus on the theme that students are more alike than they are different throughout the activity.
Circle time is usually an opening or closing activity time for preschool students and provides an opportunity for a teacher to lead a quiet activity or discussion to reflect on the day's lesson. One option for a circle time activity on friendship is to select a student as the "Friend of the Day" and invite that student to sit in the teacher's spot in the circle. Have students then take turns saying one thing that makes the "Friend of the Day" a good friend, like her ability to share or her polite behavior. Another option to encourage children to become familiar with one another is to select a volunteer to leave the room with a classroom aid. A second student then quietly leaves the circle and hides. When the first student returns, ask, "Which friend is missing?" The student has to figure out which student has left the circle and announce, "John, we miss you! Come back to the circle!"