Making & Keeping Friends: Ready-to-Use Lessons, Stories, and Activities for Building Relationships, Grades 4-8

The program presents a specific process for creating and developing relationships, and places responsibility on the individual student to create "messages" that invite friendships. It shows students, step by step, how to form strong, lasting friendships by being more inviting toward themselves and toward others.

For easy use, you'll find materials are organized into nine sections, each section focusing on important ideas about inviting friendships. Following is an overview of each section:

• UNDERSTANDING FRIENDSHIP explores friendships as a vital part of life, factors that influence friendships, and characteristics of successful friendships and includes role plays and activities such as The Loner, Giving Support and My Kind of Friend.
• BECOMING FRIENDS presents steps students can use to form and keep friendships with a variety of activities/role plays like Finding Trust and Who's on Your List?
• LEARNING ABOUT INVITATIONS introduces students to "invitations" as positive messages for building long-lasting friendships and contrasts them to "disinvitations" in activities/role plays like Self-Invitation, Lucky Interview, and Word Play.
• FOUR LEVELS OF ENCOURAGING OR DISCOURAGING FRIENDSHIP combines invitations, disinvitations, and intentions into four levels of functioning and teaches students about perceptions in activities such as Inviting Qualities and What Do You See?
• KNOWING YOURSELF explores how people "see" themselves and how the self develops and changes during a person's life, and includes activities/role plays such as Assessing Your Physical Self, Picture Yourself and Self-Concept List
• CREATING INVITATIONS TO FRIENDSHIPS presents six steps for being an inviting friend and explores ideas about when to invite, why to invite and whom to invite in activities such as Draw an Invitation and The Invitation role play.
• MAKING CHOICES & RESOLVING DIFFERENCES examines the four choices we make when inviting friends (send, not send, accept, not accept) through activities like When Not to Send and the role play Play Ball!
• CHOOSING POSITIVE BEHAVIORS stresses the importance of positive behaviors in building successful relationships in activities/role plays such as Evaluating Behaviors and The Home Page.
• SENDING YOURSELF INVITATIONS describes the importance of students' sending themselves positive messages and staying physically, emotionally and mentally fit, and includes activities like Overcoming the Odds and the role play Mirror, Mirror on the Wall.

As further help, each section begins with Group Leader Instructions, including an overview, objectives, and a description of the activities, role plays, and special vocabulary used. "Gold Nugget" ideas throughout the program help stimulate student discussion about friendship and simple cartoons bring life to ideas about inviting and disinviting behaviors.

In short, Making and Keeping Friends places in your hands a proven, ready-to-use curriculum for group discussion and guidance lessons dealing with friendship, conflict resolution, and self-development. This program gives your students a specific framework and language for examining their own behaviors and developing healthy relationships.