Year 4 have been exploring the concept of ‘Friendship’ and recognising how their own friendships have formed, and also changed, over time due to the passage of life.

Through discussion, we recognised that not all our friendships are the same in that we may value some friendships more dearly than others but agreed that this is acceptable.  From this, we mapped our own ‘Friendships’ on a ‘Concentric Circles’ mapping tool where we identified and named our ‘Best-Friends’ in the inner circle before moving outwards to map those who we consider to be ‘Close Friends’, ‘Occasional Friends’ then ‘Acquaintances’ in the outer circle.  We then explored the statement ‘Friendship is Fragile’ from which we all agreed that for friendships to last the test of time, we need to value and respect all of those we consider to be our friends now as well as  those we will go on to meet in the future.

Group Dynamics…

The children have also explored the concept of ‘Group Dynamics’ and identified that people often take on different roles in different situations such as leaders, followers and bystanders. We assimilated this concept to when we work as a group in our learning environment and highlighted the importance of including everyone to ensure that everyone’s opinions are valued.

Using our Jigsaw approach, we explored some posed scenarios to identify the roles individual’s were taking on and found that sometimes people feel pressured to act a certain way when finding themselves in a controversial situation. This enabled us to consider the term ‘Peer Pressure’ and concluded that when influenced or encouraged by our friends to do something we know is right in a positive way that this is healthy; however, when we are encouraged to do something that we may know is wrong but go ahead and do it just to ‘fit-in’ or ‘be accepted’ that this is not a healthy choice.

Great discussions Year 4!