The teacher's guide presents a set of seven lessons designed to help students understand friendship and peer relationships. The lessons focus on: (1) the desire to feel loved and accepted; (2) behaviors designed to gain acceptance from others; (3) ways that other people may use one's need for acceptance to influence one's behavior; (4) the…

Children who are consistently ignored or disliked, especially those who make no friends at all, often have trouble succeeding in school. This article illustrates the scenario of a child who is just learning to play with others, but continues to face rejection from her classmates. The author provides tips for both teachers and parents that can…

This article suggests specific strategies to prevent rejection and isolation and encourage interactions when students with disabilities are integrated into general education classes. Teachers are encouraged to foster proximity, teach peer support and friendship skills, foster respect for individual differences, and provide a positive model. (DB)

This article presents a rationale for matching social skills intervention strategies to the skill and comfort levels that typically developing children show toward their peers with special needs and provides teachers with guidance on how to accomplish this match. Environmental manipulations that facilitate interactions and peer-mediated strategies…

This manual describes the buddy skills training program, which provides teachers with a set of tested strategies designed to facilitate interactions and support the development of friendships between preschoolers with and without disabilities. The training procedures are philosophically based on social exchange theory. To support the concept of…

The central theme of the booklet is that integration does not just occur naturally as a result of merely placing students of different race or ethnic groups in the same school setting. It occurs by the special efforts of classroom teachers who encourage student friendship formations. The booklet contains a variety of teaching strategies which…

This book for children (ages 8 to 14) and accompanying teacher/parent guide presents the story of two young friends, one of whom uses a wheelchair and coaches her friend in coping with a broken leg. Information on the disability is deliberately presented subtly and incidentally to encourage the reader to relate more personally and foster a deeper…