We talk about friendship with our preschoolers a lot. Friendship is a good concept to cover with early learners, because it’s important to help them build good friends at a young age. It also makes great alphabet printables for learning the letter F.
I love this free Ephesians 4:32 printable because it describes a good friend and it gives us another “f” word to practice with: forgiving. And, after all, forgiveness is an essential part of maintaining a good friendship. To go along with the idea of friends, we did an easy friendship building activity for kids to help them learn to value the good qualities in each other.
If you like this activity, check out this list of kids’ books about friendship to read as a family!
Simple Friendship Activity for Kids
For this activity, we started by tracing the kids onto some packing paper I got in a recent Amazon shipment. It was a little wrinkly, but the kids didn’t seem to mind. I should tell you, I got interrupted twice while trying to trace the kids. Couple that with my total lack of artistic talent and… well… this is what you get!
Next, we taped the posters to the wall and talked about what it means to be a good friend. We started with the ears and I asked, “What is something we can do with our ears to be a good friend?” The kids were full of good ideas about what it means to be a good friend, so I was quite pleased about that. Now, if only they could all learn to put it into practice (the age-old dilemma!).
As the kids gave suggestions, I wrote them on cards and placed them near the appropriate body part. It was kind of fun hearing a three-year-old’s definition of a “good friend”. My (almost) two-year-old son even had a suggestion when we asked what we can do with our mouth: “Say please.” That’s a good friend move.
For our activity, I made a chart with the girls’ names and then a “Both” column in the middle. I wrote out some things I knew about the girls such as favorite color, pets, as well as some physical descriptions like short hair etc. I also wrote things that were true of both girls such as “likes to run” and “is funny”.
I cut up the descriptions and then went through them one by one with the girls so we could place them in the appropriate column. They caught on right away and loved identifying where to put the description. They also loved acting out a few like “likes to run”.
How Friends are Different
For another activity, we talked about how friends can be different and friends can be the same. We read through the book, Little Quack’s New Friend. In this book, Little Quack’s brothers and sisters are hesitant to let a little frog play with them because he is so different. Little Quack takes the lead and before you know it, everyone is playing happily together.
How do you learn about friendship in your house?
Resources about Friendship for Kids:
These Amazon affiliate resources about friendship for kids can help children learn about being good friends!