Making Friendship Salad to Build Community in the Classroom

Making Friendship Salad is the traditional end to our first week of school. It is a great activity to demonstrate how a community of learners work together in the classroom to make it a better place. This blog post shares how we made fruit "friendship" salad in our room.

To get ready to make Friendship Salad...

• We sent a letter home asking each child to bring a piece of fruit to school on Thursday so that I can prepare everything for Friday. 
• We reproduced, laminated, and bound our Friendship Salad recipe book.
• We reproduced the follow up cut and paste activity.

To get ready for Friday...

• We washed all of the fruit. 
• We peeled the oranges, sliced the apples, removed the tops from the strawberries, etc.  This makes it easier for the kids.

On Friday we made the Friendship Salad.  The children used plastic cutting boards and knives to slice the fruit into smaller pieces.  We talk about sharing our fruit with others to make the fruit salad even better.  Here is where we start to make the connection to the classroom.  "Just like when the fruit comes together in the bowl it makes a wonderful salad, we can come together in our classroom to make it a wonderful place to be!"

As the children cut the fruit, we scraped it into a large plastic bowl each time saying how much better the salad is getting as we add more kinds of fruit. We talk about each fruit still being in the salad, just like we are all individuals. But, when we all work together we can make something really great!

Just as we are getting ready to mix everything together and serve the salad into bowls for the children, I "remember" that I haven't added my piece of fruit.  For this, you will need a "rotten" banana.  If you do not have an overly ripe banana, simply place one in the freezer overnight and it will turn the skin brown. When you show your banana to the children, most likely someone will let you know that it is a "rotten" banana! We talk about if we should add it to the bowl or not.  I help the children make the connection between a rotten banana spoiling our fruit salad, just like if we acted like a "rotten banana" we could spoil our classroom.

After agreeing not to add the rotten banana, we served the friendship salad into small bowls.

Then we shared it with our friends. 

For a follow up activity, the kids complete the How to Make Friendship Salad sequencing Activity. They cut apart the steps and glue them in the correct order on the recording page.
The recipe book, parent letter, and cut and paste sequencing activity can be found in this resource.