Be a Friend | Be a Hero
According to Erik Erikson, adolescents are trying to figure out who they are to form a basic identity they will build on throughout their lives. Before they can form strong friendships, they need opportunities to consider a variety of goals and values, decide which to accept and reject, and then determine who they are as unique individuals. To facilitate this transition, our new programming is titled Be a Friend/Be a Hero, and will engage parents and teachers in helping youth value and develop 5 qualities of a good friend. Did you know that by being a good friend you can be someone’s hero?
Middle School can often be a challenging transition for some students. In order to help ease that transition and reduce some of the anxiety and stress that can develop during this critical time of development, we surveyed current Middle School students to identify a few of the specific challenges they faced. The feedback we received was great and from that we created the, “Be a Friend/Be a Hero” curriculum. Although Stress Happens successfully provided participants with tools for managing stress, we now want to shift to help build youth identity and self-awareness, which are essential for healthy psycho-social development.
We started 2020 off by teaching 5th and 6th grade students in both St. Joe and Elkhart County what it means to be a good friend by means of the Be a Friend/ Be a Hero program. Students are first asked to identify what it means to them to be a good friend and how they could potentially use those qualities to help out another person and be a hero.
We then reveal the qualities gathered from the current Middle School data. Those Qualities are listed below.
- Caring
- Trustworthy
- Honest
- Loyal
- Respectful
After these qualities are explored we then challenge the students to take action and be a friend and hero! Students were asked to complete a form to describe their action and which of the 5 qualities it aligns with and place it in a designated bag. Stay tuned for next month’s Newsletter to read some of the examples the students came up with and how your child is being a hero by being a friend!
