How To Make a Friend

This board has my heart.  Every adult that walks in our room has to hear, "Have you seen our friendship board?" (I'm sure they're tired of it already.)  Reading these stories and connecting them has helped create a lot of friendship "anchors".  We've already had more than a few Penelope Rex conversation reminders.

This post contains affiliate links which means Amazon tosses me some change whenever someone makes a purchase through one of these links and allows me feed my book habit!

I've gotten a lot of questions on Instagram about this board, so I thought I'd put all of the information in one spot.  I originally got the idea from this post that Matt from Digital Divide and Conquer shared on Instagram:

It was a picture taken in his daughter's classroom.  I don't know who his daughter's teacher was, but clearly she's awesome. (Update: This wonderful teacher is Camille Olson!)

Here are the ten books I used.  You can use any friendship book you'd like though!  As I sorted my classroom library, I just through every book even remotely related to friendship to the side and made my list from what I had.

1. Respect Personal Space: We Don't Eat Our Classmates

2. Be Patient: You Will Be My Friend!

3. Say Hello: The Invisible Boy

4. Learn Names: Alma and How She Got Her Name

5. Be Open Minded: Enemy Pie

6. Include Others: Strictly No Elephants

7. Celebrate Differences: The Sandwich Swap

8. Be Careful with Your Words: Nerdy Birdy Tweets

9. Accept Help: The Quickest Kid in Clarksville

10. Help Each Other: Those Shoes

If you're looking for more friendship books, Jillian Heise (you can find her on Instagram at heisereads) has an awesome friendship Goodreads list here.

The letters I made myself using a font from The Perfect Blend called PB Morning Java.  The letters are just a text box on top of three boxes.  You can make it in PowerPoint or download a free template here.  I used KG Blank Space on the template because it's a free font.

The signs are just a few layered rectangles with a text box.  This is available in the free file, also, and the colors are editable.

The pictures I made by taking a picture of the book cover using the app Cam Scanner.  It fixes the distortion really nicely.  You can read more about how to use the Cam Scan app here.

I know some people get book cover images from the GoodReads website for #classroombookaday displays, so that would work, too.  I printed the covers on cardstock at about 5 inches wide except for We Don't Eat Our Classmates because it was landscape image.

**Click here to watch some of my Instagram stories about the board**

Now that we've finished this board, after a few weeks, we'll move onto to our What Does It Mean to Persevere board.  You can read about it here.  This idea could be adapted to fit any character trait or content subject.  Let me know if you have any questions, and I'll add the info to this post!