Friendship

Dear Educators,

National Friendship Day is coming up! I’ve always believed we can learn so much from the children we care for, as teachers and parents. One of the things I’ve always been grateful to emulate in my own life is the childhood reverence for friendship. As we grow older, many of us begin to focus on work and family and can feel ourselves drifting away from even our most cherished friendships. It is a shame, because good friends are the tribe you get to choose. Children celebrate their friendships and spend time nurturing them. COVID-19 has made it even harder to stay connected to our social networks, but as we are forced apart, we can see how important it is to make time to come together. Guiding and teaching children isn’t all about showing them new things; sometimes it’s about fostering the good habits they intrinsically have. The resources this week are all about the beauty of friendship. I hope this can be a conversation starter to encourage both the students in your life, and you, to reach out to your chosen tribe.

Earth Day Interactive Map

With our typical social haunts being off limits, many of us are taking to nature to enjoy a change of scenery from our homes. Hopefully, this experience has brought home the deep importance of protecting the environment so generations to come can enjoy the same beautiful splendor granted to us. Earth Day might have passed, but its mission to celebrate our friendship with the earth certainly hasn’t! Explore the environmental problems and solutions in this interactive map!

Beatrix Potter is one of the authors I admire the most, and reading the Peter Rabbit stories is a highlight of my childhood. Inspired by her friendships with animal friends on her farm, she brought Peter’s personality to life and made him a friend to us all. It’s a beautiful example of how art can make an imaginary friend to one, a friend to all. 

The foundation of any relationship is trust. Whether with our students, our partners, friends, children, colleagues, or bosses, without trust there is a fundamentally broken relationship. We tend to talk about trust as a feeling as opposed to a set of definitions. This fascinating video of Brene Brown talks about what constitutes the feeling of trust. The ability to fix or develop trusting relationships is greatly helped by being able to break it down into its component parts. It gives us a language to discuss how trust might have been violated, and insight into how to repair it.