Book 10: Friends

Standards:

K-4.1 Identify qualities of good citizenship, including honesty, courage, determination, individual responsibility, and patriotism.

K-4.2 Demonstrate good citizenship in classroom behaviors, including taking personal responsibility, cooperating and respecting others, taking turns and sharing, and working with others to solve problems.

Summary:

Friends, is a story of three unlikely friends of a pig, a rooster, and a mouse. Throughout the story they do all kinds of things together but sometimes they have to do things differently or share things in different ways because they are so different. Even when they eat cherries, they give the pig twice as many because he is bigger and it is fairer for him to have more. Throughout the story the animals are great friends and they share and are fair in almost all of the situations. Until they try to sleep together at night and realize that they all can’t sleep in the same place because they sleep differently. Although they cannot be together at night, they are still best friends no matter what.

Objectives:

The students will demonstrate an understanding of what it means to be fair through a fairness exercise.

Materials:

Book: Friends by Helme Hine

Candy

Chart paper

Marker

Procedure:
1. The teacher will begin the lesson by telling the students that she is going to pass out candy to the students today.
2. The teacher will give each child a piece of candy, but skipping one child at each group of tables.
3. If students make comments during the exercise the teacher will ignore them.
4. Once the teacher has passed out all of the candy she will listen to what the students are saying about some not getting any candy.
5. The teacher will ask the students if they think what she did was fair or not.
6. The teacher will talk to the students about what it means to be fair and will introduce the book Friends.
7. The teacher will read the book Friends to the students in the class.
8. Once the teacher has read the book to the class she will talk to the students about what it means to be fair.
9. The teacher will explain to the students that to be fair means to be reasonable and to treat others equally.
10. The teacher will ask the students what they think it means to be a fair member of the community and write them on the chart paper.
11. The teacher will go over each item with the students and talk about how being fair means being part of a community and doing the right thing.