What is Friendly Friday?
Every Friday, my class and I have “Friendly Friday.” It’s a great tradition in our classroom that was started in 2017. Friday afternoons can be tough and so, we started doing some fun activities that were steeped in the principals of SEAL: get creative and do something kind for another person.
Many times, my students would pick the name of another classmate and secretly create a note or card for that person. Later, I would present each card to the students somewhat ceremoniously. It was a great way to promote and teach kindness, appreciating others and their interests, finding something good in another person and how to get creative on the spot. Not to mention, we also practiced making eye contact with and saying thank you to the person who made the card as well as saying, “You’re welcome.”
Making Hands
This past week, we took things in a different direction and made a great piece of class art that showed how each of us can be friendly to others!
Here’s what we did:
First we talked about different ways we can be friendly and supportive to other people regardless of whether or not they are our “friends.” Many ideas came up:
- Say hi.
- Smile.
- Help them pick up something that fell.
- Help them in they fall.
- Say, “You’re a nice person.”
- Wave to your friend.
- Tell someone they look good.
- Invite someone to have lunch with you.
- Ask them how their day was.
- Play with someone on the playground.
Next, I showed my fourth graders the example of my hand, saying, “Everyone is going to make their own Friendly Hand that shows one way you can be friendly to another person.”
(Of course, you can take a different approach to this by calling them Helping Hands or Kind Gestures. Do whatever works for you! I kept it to friendly because of my Friendly Friday theme.)
Finally, it was time to get students making their hands. I demonstrated how to place their hands and forearms on the paper and invited kids to help one another – another lesson in being friendly!
Once students drew their hands, I asked them to each write a draft of what they would put on their forearm so that I could check the spelling. Then, each student could decide to either design and color or cut out their hand first.
Finally, we ended up with a classroom’s worth of hands to start arranging and gluing to the background. That was fun! The kids loved standing around, watching their hand get added, and reading others’ messages.
Here’s the final product!
Always Reflect with SEAL!
As with any good SEAL activity, we took a little time to reflect on the experience before cleaning up and getting ready to go home. Some comments were:
“I like how some have the same words and others are different.”
“I like how So-and-So layered their colors.”
“Everyone’s hands look so different from one another!”
“So-and-So did a great job with her design.”
“I tried to make my colors match what I wrote.”
It was also important to steer the reflections to an understanding of how everyone is different and created something similar, yet so different from everyone else. A visual lesson in social-awareness!
Adaptations
The idea of the hand can be used in so many ways for students of all ages and it can also take on many themes such as friendliness, kindness, uniqueness and individuality!
This picture shows a hand project of individuality, uniqueness and togetherness. First, students created “Henna Hands” or “Zentangle Hands.” Then, the hands (of an entire grade level) were arranged so that that they made a display of how everyone is unique, but part of the same whole.
Here are more ideas:
- Have students create a poem about friendship or kindness to write on their hand.
- Change up the materials. Sharpie and watercolors are always fun. So is coloring with markers and washing over with a wet paintbrush.
Students can make a helping hand to give to a peer, teacher, parent or younger student.- On the hand, they can write down a great quote, an act of kindness, a good intention or an act of gratitude.
- Students can present a hand to someone who did something great: “Give Yourself a Hand!”
- Have students “Raise Their Hand!” and state something they are good at or proud of doing. This could be great after a term, the school year or a long project. (Make long arms for this idea so that it looks like the hands are being raised.)
There are so many possibilities with hands! Have fun with this one!
Want to learn more about how to build peer to peer relationships with your own Friendly Fridays? Go HERE to get all the details of this transforming classroom experience!
