A great tool for building community in your classroom!
I put together a set of friendship blocks (or tubes) for my class to play with and to also use as a tool for helping my students get more familiar with each other…
The How-to
To make our friendship blocks, we printed a photo of each child on paper and cut it out. Then we taped each photo to a tube using clear packing tape and placed all the tubes in the shelf in our block center…
In my years of teaching, I have noticed that my students tend to begin the year playing beside each other (parallel play) rather than with each other. Because of this, it isn’t unusual for the children to take quite some time to learn each other’s name or to really put a name to face…
Fostering Community
Our friendship blocks are helping the children draw connections between faces and names. The friendship blocks also give each child a sense of community and belonging as they see their personalized block standing up and along side all the other children in the classroom…
Promoting Friendship
The friendship blocks are available for play all throughout the day but we have also been using them as a large group to create friendship towers…
Or to invite discussion about ourselves or each other…
Some of the children like to set their friendship tube next to them throughout the day while they do other activities…
Identity in the Classroom
And as a little bonus, I printed and cut out an extra set of photos for our magnet board. Yes, we are finding ourselves all over our classroom…
And with the help of our friendship blocks and our people magnets, my students are getting a solid grasp on who is who in our classroom and are quickly feeling more comfortable with each other and as a community…
About our Tube Blocks
To learn more about where we collected these tubes for free, be sure and read this post —-> Building and playing with our free tube blocks and where you can find them too.
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