Your littlest learners will love the friendship activities for preschoolers in this blog post. These friendship activities for preschoolers are perfect to incorporate into your classrooms for back-to-school. Use the friendship theme for preschool in a traditional school or homeschool setting!
Do you want all the activities in this blog post? Check out the preschool friendship unit here.
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Read About Friendship
We read 5 books about friendships for our friendship activities for preschoolers. For each of the books, we did 5 reading lessons, one for each day of the week.
The first book we read aloud for our friendship activities for preschoolers was Boo Who? by Ben Clanton. We talked about problems and solutions in the story. After reading, the students illustrated the problem and solution in the story.
We worked on comprehension next. I printed out some questions to ask while reading on sticky notes and placed them in the next book, Gaston by Kelly DiPucchio.
On Wednesday, we worked on character traits. We talked about what a character is and what character traits are. Then we read the story Bad Apple by Edward Hemingway. After reading the story, we drew a character and wrote some of the traits that describe it.
Next, we read My Friend is Sad by Mo Willems and worked on our predictions. I held up the book and asked the kids, based on the cover alone, what they think it will be about. Then we take a picture walk through the book, read the title, and ask if their predictions have changed. Finally, we read the book aloud and then talk about our predictions.
Our final reading activity in the friendship activities for preschoolers unit was our alphabet emergent readers. This week’s focus was the letter F for friendship. The students tracked the print as they read through the book.
Literacy Friendship Activities for Preschoolers
We began our friendship activities for preschoolers with a cover the letter worksheet. The kids worked on matching upper and lower-case letters by covering the upper-case letters with coding stickers with their lower-case counterparts written on them.
Next, we moved on to beginning sounds. The kids said the name of each picture aloud and circled the images that began with the F sound.
We worked on spelling our names by making friendship bracelets. To make the bracelets, we used pipe cleaners, alphabet beads, and other decorative beads.
The next of our friendship activities for preschoolers are journal prompts. There are 3 journal prompts that revolve around the topic of friendship for students to respond to. They can use words, pictures, or a combination of both to write their responses.
Our final literacy activity for our friendship unit was salt tray letter writing. The kids used their fingers or a paintbrush to copy the letter cards in their salt boxes. I like the convenience of these pencil boxes because when the activity is finished, we close the lid for easy clean up.
Math Friendship Activities for Preschoolers
Our first math friendship activity for preschoolers was a counting clip cards activity. The students count the number of hearts in the dump truck and clip that number on the card. This is a great activity for 1 – 1 counting and fine motor skills.
Our next math activity was a friendship fill up the bus counting activity. The bus is a ten-frame. There are number cards, and the students need to put the correct number of students on the bus to match the number card.
We next looked at nonstandard measurement. The kids used unifix cubes to measure the rainbows and recorded their answers on the sheet.
The fourth math activity for the week deals with shapes. The students identified the shapes and traced them using dry-erase markers.
The final of our math friendship activities for preschoolers was a feed the friend game. This is a great game to practice counting, color recognition, taking turns, and working with a partner.
Friendship Sensory, Science, and Social
On Monday, I put out our sensory table for the week. It was a friendship-themed table. I used colorful pom poms for the base of the table. I scattered plastic insects on the table. Then I put out our scoopers so the kids could interact and play with the table.
Our next activity in our preschool friendship unit was a ripped paper self-portrait. We used small mirrors to look at ourselves while we recreated our portraits using hand-ripped construction paper. These turned out really cute and would look great as a class bulletin board.
We did science by making mini volcanoes in a muffin tin. I placed food coloring below the baking soda so that when students added the vinegar and the reaction occurred, there was a color change as well.
Then we moved on to color mixing hearts. The students worked in pairs to see what new color would appear when they painted handprints on a piece of white paper.
The final activity for our friendship activities for preschoolers is a fingerprint activity where students can examine their fingerprints and the prints of their classmates to see how we are all unique.
I hope you enjoyed this friendship theme for preschool, and if you want to use these activities, you can grab them in my preschool friendship unit. Make sure to check out this blog post if you’re looking for kindness activities for preschoolers.
