Hi everyone! I’m Mandy Bush and I am the executive assistant for Cardinal Rule Press (Maria’s publishing company). I am a mother of 2 (son and daughter) and I will be blogging on Be the Difference and will be recapping some valuable tips from Empowering Kids With Character – The Show!
On April 19th, Maria continued her April Character trait of friendship and shared a great way on how to teach our children that you can have more than one friend- you can watch the full video here.
Maria shared with us her new book, The Fruit Salad Friend, which is all about FRIENDSHIP!!! This book describes friendship as a recipe for a true friend, as including the sweet fruits and not the sour ones. We don’t want to be around mean and unkind friends, we want to be around those who are kind and sweet!
There was a fun activity Maria shared (free and paid version was shared – see below) to help our children see that having more than one friend helps us have a well-rounded recipe of friendship! Some friends are really good at listening and some are really good at making us laugh.
Lesson:
FREE: Rainbow of friends – explain to your child that friends bring different things to the table.
- Have child color/paint a rainbow (printable here). Have them choose a friend’s name for each color and choose their favorite characteristic of that friend. What is that friend’s best quality?
PAID (Teaching with Crayons and Curls):
- Have your child put a friend’s name and their favorite characteristic of that friend on each piece of fruit. Then glue all their fruit into the bowl – they’ve created a fruit salad of friends!
Each friend may not have the same quality. Explain to your child that one friend cannot do it all – that’s too much pressure! We need to remind our children (and ourselves) that it’s great to have more than one friend that we can rely on.
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