We all know that an important social skill is sharing but sometimes teaching how to share needs to be done deliberately. This can take many different forms including direct instruction, read alouds, and activities. If you are working on behavioral expectations and teaching a child to share is on your must-do list, read on for some fun ideas you can use today.
Teaching How To Learn Sharing Using Direct Instruction
Direct instruction, or providing a specific lesson, can be very valuable when teaching how to learn sharing. Not everyone has the same vocabulary terms they know or starts with the same basic knowledge. When teachers share knowledge with students by giving direct instruction, everyone is on the same page.
To start teaching children to share and take turns, define the important terms. This can be as simple as stating sharing is to let someone else have or use something that belongs to you or you are using.
Next move into how there are different things that can be shared. This includes objects as well as a person’s attention. Have students come up with their own examples of different things that can be shared. This should include things they share in their everyday lives.
Following that, it is important to cover how sharing looks. A great way to do this is to model it for students. Another helpful way is to go over scenarios. These can be situations that could really happen in your students’ everyday lives. Additionally, you could pose ‘how could sharing happen in this situation?’ questions. This could be as simple as “Sally and Bryan both want to play with the toy car during indoor recess.” Then have students state different ways they could share the toy car.
Not sure that you have the time to develop a lesson for teaching sharing in the classroom? Then check out this done-for-you lesson plan and activity resource. Included is a two page sharing lesson plan as well as almost all the teacher materials (except crayons), a list of extension activities, visual scenarios, real-life scenarios, and an activity to practice the sharing skills. The included sharing lesson ideas include defining sharing, stating different things someone can share, tells how sharing looks, and explains why sharing is important. Grab this time saving teaching sharing to kindergarten, first grade, or even second grade resource here.
Teaching Children How To Share with Books
Using books as a read aloud is both fun and helpful. Here are some books to use when teaching children how to share.
Llama, Llama Time to Share by Anna Dewdney – Llama Llama is always a fan favorite character. And it is a perfect fit for teaching children how to share. In this fun book, Llama gets a new neighbor who he has over for play time. He struggles to share and his favorite toy gets ripped in the process. Llama learns a valuable lesson on sharing by the end of the book.
Andre Learns to Share: A Story About the Benefits of Sharing by Mikaela Wilson is another excellent choice when teaching a child to share. In this book, the main character has a friend over to play. While playing, he struggles to share his favorite toy with them. Then his mom comes up with an idea of how to share the toy that both are happy with. There is a nice strategy to share in this book that your students might like.
Should I Share My Ice Cream? by Mo Willems is a beloved Piggy and Elephant book. Gerald has to decide if he is going to share his ice cream with Piggy. But ice cream melts quickly so he has to think fast. Just like all the other books in this series, there are many simple graphics and speech bubbles that are sure to be loved when teaching children to share and take turns.
Learning How To Share With Activities
There are many different activities and games that you can do when learning how to share. Here are three helpful ideas.
Build a Tower activity is first on the list. Give students a pile of stacking blocks and ask them to build the tallest tower together. Have them take turns placing blocks to build a tower. While doing so, talk about why it is important to share supplies and work together to achieve a common goal.
Another thing you can do is teaching students how to collaborate and share at the same time. A great activity that you can use to do this is Team Color. This is a super simple activity. All you need to do is pass out one coloring page to two or three students. Tell them that they are going to be coloring a picture together. Set a timer for 30 seconds and have one student start coloring. When the timer goes off, pass the coloring page to the next student. Continue until the entire page is colored. This will help students see that they can all share in the task of coloring a picture. It will also help them to be a flexible thinker when someone colors the picture in a way that is different from how they pictured it in their own mind.
A third way to practice is using worksheets. You could make some simple sheets that define the terms or sorting ones where students sort if sharing is happening or not. Another idea is to make ones with scenarios where students identify if sharing is happening or not. Alternatively, using scenarios, give the beginning part of a situation and have students fill in what the next step could look like if sharing was taking place.
Looking for some pre-done worksheets? Then grab this packed 35 page resource contains a 5 page flip book to help students better understand what sharing is as well as 12 other worksheets to further develop their understanding. The twelve other worksheets contain information on deepening understanding of how sharing looks, the order of it, how sharing (or not sharing) feels for self and others, relating it to their own life, and more. Find this time-saving resource here.
Teaching children how to share is a very important social skill that is needed both in the classroom and outside the classroom. Some great ways to teach sharing include direct instruction on the subject, read alouds, and activities like games and worksheets like those above. Whatever way you work with students on this important skill, just know it is helpful to students who are lacking in social skills.
Happy Teaching!
