The Friendship Farm Curriculum Bundle for SEL

Inside: Use The Friendship Farm Curriculum Bundle for Social Emotional Learning to connect farm animals to friendship and kindness.

When my kids were in preschool and kindergarten, one of our go-to field trips was to our local farm every fall and spring. In the fall, we would pick pumpkins and in the spring we would pick strawberries.

But the big draw was always visiting the animals. We saw everything from goats to peacocks to sheep to horses, although the best visit was when my three year old got to feed a baby goat their bottle of milk.

Since kids love farm animals, it’s easy to connect other learning to farm animals and “sneak in” learning for math and reading and social emotional learning, or share fun farm-themed activities like these cow jokes for kids.

And with that, The Friendship Farm was created since it connects literacy, math skills (sorting/comparing), and social emotional learning in a fun, hands-on way.

What is Social Emotional Learning and Why It’s Important:

Social Emotional Learning Includes 5 major components:

1. Self-Awareness

Are kids in tune with their bodies and emotions so they keep getting better at handling setbacks and new challenges?

This includes things like knowing what you need and want, labeling your emotions, recognizing your strengths and areas of improvement, increasing self-confidence, and building a growth mindset.

2. Self Management

Can kids manage or handle themselves without adult intervention?

This includes managing and controlling your emotions without losing control (teaching kids to be mad without being mean), controlling impulses, dealing with stress, creating the internal motivation to set and reach big and small goals, and creating organizational skills to reach those goals.

3. Social Awareness

Do kids know how to interact with peers around them in socially acceptable and positive ways?

This includes celebrating and appreciating diversity and differences, respecting other people’s thoughts/beliefs/values, belongings, and personal space, showing empathy and compassion towards others, and seeing things from different perspectives.

4. Relationship Skills

Can kids interact with, work with, and deal with other people in positive ways?

This includes communicating with others effectively, dealing with conflicts or issues in appropriate ways, learning how to be a good friend and a good teammate, standing up to bullying behaviors, and cooperating and using teamwork.

5. Decision-Making Skills

Do kids understand the consequences of their actions and make decisions accordingly?

This includes understanding cause and effect when making big and small decisions and understanding that their decisions will have a positive or negative outcome/consequence, problem-solving, and reflecting on their decisions to evaluate their behavior/decisions.

Research has shown that social emotional learning curriculum and concepts:

help reduce bullying behaviors in schools
create a safe learning environment for all students
improves academic success and even test scores
increases students’ emotional intelligence which decreases outbursts, meltdowns/tantrums, etc.
improves school attendance
reduces behavior issues
builds a positive classroom environment and school culture
encourages kindness, empathy, compassion and helpfulness

We can incorporate all of these concepts and get the beneefits of social emotional learning when we intentionally introduce SEL Curriculum into our classrooms.

You can use this Year Long SEL Curriculum that’s done for you and ready to go.

Or you can use SEL Curriculum that’s connected to other things you’re already learning like our Kindness Zoo our ABCs and 123s of Kindness Bundle and our Friendship Farm.

How to Use The Friendship Farm Curriculum for Social Emotional Learning

Purchase The Friendship Farm Curriculum and print out what you want to use.

Print out the book in color or black and white and then staple the pages into books. Or introduce a page at a time and staple it into a book at the end. You can use all the pages or only the ones you choose.

If you use the black and white version of the book, students can color the animals and farmers and create backgrounds (especially on the mouse page!)

Cut apart the pages in the book. I use a paper cutter to make it easier!

Staple the pages together.

If you use the black and white book, students can color or highlight the letter(s) of the page (both the animal name and the kindness action) to reinforce letter/sound recognition and the digraphs sh and ch.

Before you read, go over the vocabulary concepts like fair, compliments, roots for others, and standing up for others.

Connect this with your farm unit or animal unit and go over animals that live on a farm and what animals they have seen or already learned about. Explain the relationship between horse and foal, sheep and lamb, and rooster, hen, and chick. You can also categorize and/or sort the farm animals into mammals and birds and one arachnid.

Farm Animals included in this book:

cow
horse
foal
sheep
lamb
donkey
rooster
hen
chick
pig
goose
mouse
turkey
duck
spider
goat
and farmers!

Read the book as a whole group, in small groups, and/or for independent reading time.

Place copies of the book in your classroom library or send home to read with their families.

Brainstorm ways to answer the questions for the writing. You can use the writing prompts for discussion starters if they’re pre-writers or to help them answer the questions.

To use the writing, students can sound out their sentences, dictate their sentences, or copy ideas off the board/paper. Or if you’re in a class setting, you can do a group writing as a class.

To connect to science (animal classification) and math (categorizing and sorting) you can use the worksheet to sort some of the animals from The Friendship Farm.

Kids can cut apart the animal squares, glue them down as they sort the farm animals into mammals or birds, and then color the animals.