Content Objectives
The central aim of this unit is to begin a conversation that will empower students to think deeply about friendship, a topic that is significantly relevant throughout every person's life. I came to this idea through questioning my own pedagogical practices. I started to ask myself: How can I make my read-aloud time more engaging and relevant to my students' lives? I realized that I frequently chose from a group of "old-favorites" without thought to a deeper purpose for my text choices. Often, my read-aloud selections are chosen because they offer a chance for vocabulary development or they complement some aspect of the content being learned at the time. But, I began to wonder if I could put together a more thoughtful series of read-aloud texts that might connect to each other as well as to my students in a more significant way. Could I put together a group of texts connected by a common theme? If so, what theme might be important for every one of my students? And then it hit me: friendship. Friendship is a universally significant topic.
Developmental Phases of Children's Friendships
First and second-grade students are in a unique developmental period in which their friendships, or concept of 'friend,' starts to shift to become more complex and multifaceted. Jacqueline Smollar and James Youniss conducted a study on how children's concept of friendship develops. They found that six to seven year old children mostly say that people become friends when they merely "perform an activity together." Children in this age group also described a best friend as someone whom you spend more time with than other people. Friendships were defined by the amount of time spent together rather than the quality of the time spent. By ages nine to ten children still qualify friendship in this way but add to it the idea that friends "share with or help each other." By ages twelve to thirteen most children say that people become friends if they can "get to know each other" to discover if "they like the same things." 3 It is their conclusion that children who are in first and second grade have a very simple and somewhat superficial definition of what constitutes "friendship."
Zick Rubin adds to the discussion of how young children understand and talk about "friendship." He writes,
What sorts of people make good friends? For the young child who views friendship in terms of momentary interactions, the most important qualification for friendship is physical accessibility…Young children are also likely to focus on specific physical actions…for children at this level, moreover, one's own desires may be seen as a sufficient basis for friendship. When you ask a young child why a certain other child is his friend, the most common reply is "Because I like him." 4
However, Rubin tries to complicate the view that children's understanding of "friendships" develops alongside their movement away from strictly concrete thought to an increased capacity for abstraction. He posits that children integrate a constantly growing number of social experiences into their slowly developing capacity for abstraction. It is this interplay between experience and developing cognition – nurture and nature – that meld together to create a child's sense of "friendship."
I believe Rubin's theory that experience must mix with cognitive development and that I can work to make more transparent for my students the processes involved in transitioning from a simple conception of what makes someone a friend to a more multifaceted understanding of such close relationships. I hope that my students' growing capacity for empathy will help them navigate these transitions through the next few years. I hope to nudge them towards considering points of view other than their own because I feel it is an essential skill for negotiating a social landscape. Egocentric thinking can quickly lead to hurt feelings.
Through their interactions with peers, children discover that other children are similar to them in some respects and different in others. And as children attempt to cooperate with one another, they discover that the coordination of behavior requires an appreciation of the other's capabilities, desires, and values. At first, these "discoveries" remain implicit and unexamined. Gradually, however, children integrate and organize what they have learned, leading to increasingly sophisticated understandings of social relationships. Talking openly about conflicts may be one particularly valuable way to further one's understanding of friendship. 5
As Rubin explains, if one only focuses on what he wants and how he feels then he will not successfully participate in a social environment. This unit is designed to offer opportunities to teach empathy through a carefully constructed series of read-aloud texts. They include text that progress from more simple/explicit to more complex along many dimensions that will converge to meet my students' needs as readers and social beings.
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