Friendship Qualities Lesson Plan

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Standards Addressed

• Self-Awareness: recognizing one’s emotions and values, as well as one’s strengths and limitations
• Relationship Skills: The ability to establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships with diverse individuals and groups

Objective

Students will be able to identify key qualities they seek in friends and reflect on their own characteristics to evaluate their friendship skills.

Materials

• Computer / Internet access
• Notebook or digital journal
• Printed and digital formats of prompts
• Sentence starters and text-to-speech options

Assessments

Students can be assessed on:

• Identifying healthy and unhealthy qualities in friendships
• Completing a reflective assignment where they list at least five qualities they value in a friend and assess whether they possess those qualities themselves

Activating Prior Knowledge

Begin with a quick interactive icebreaker. Students pair up and share one quality they value in a friend. Pose the question: "What makes someone a good friend?". Record responses visually (whiteboard, chart paper, or digital tool like Canva). Allow students to respond verbally, in writing, or with visual representations.

Lesson Steps

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1) Ask students to independently identify an example of a good and a bad friend from any media (movie, show, book, comic, etc.), including a reason and evidence for their choices. Students can use the internet, books in the classroom, or pull from stories they have seen/read.

2) Students pair up to share and discuss their character examples. Partners can provide feedback and agree/disagree on examples to provide a different perspective.

3) Facilitate discussion with scaffolded questions:

• What qualities made the friendship work?

• What qualities were missing when a friend let the other down?

Circulate during discussions to offer guidance and support. Provide templates, checklists, or digital tools (slides, graphic organizers, voice notes) to support different learning preferences

4) As a class, compile a list of positive friendship qualities based on the media examples by each student.

5) When completed, have students share their presentations. Encourage students to ask the presenter thoughtful questions. The goal is to have students get to know each other better and see their commonality in all having interests that make them feel a certain way.

6) Ask the class: "Which of these qualities do you think you possess? Where do you shine and where could you grow as a friend?" Clarify that self-awareness is essential for healthy friendships, even if students initially think it's only about identifying what they want in others.

7) Invite students to voluntarily share a personal example of when they shined as a friend or when they might have failed to show one of the friendship qualities. Use the example below or your own to model:

"Let me share a time when I let a friend down and wasn’t reliable. I promised a friend I would go to the movies with them. I got caught up in a home project and lost track of time. I missed the movie and felt horrible. I called right away to apologize. They were upset, but eventually gave me another chance. I made it up to them and we went to the movie the next week. I worked to fix my mistake and we’re still good friends today. That experience reminded me how important it is to be reliable as a friend."

Reflection

Have students reflect and connect the lesson to their own lives by listing five friendship qualities they value most in a friend. Next, have students identify one quality from their list that they want to improve in themselves over this school year.

Students may choose to express their reflection in multiple ways: written response, video or audio recording (e.g., Padlet, Screencastify), or creating a digital visual collage.

If needed, provide sentence starters such as:

• "The five qualities that I value most in a friend are..."
• "This year, I will work on ___ by..."

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Here is the printable version of  Friendship Qualities Lesson Plan.

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