Friendship Explorers
Friendship Explorers: Fall Adventures
Think • Connect • Create • Adapt
This would be a 6-week, hands-on enrichment program designed to help children strengthen social skills, critical thinking, executive functioning, and flexible thinking through play, creative challenges, and collaborative problem-solving.
Over the six weeks, the children would work together on one larger project: designing and building their own miniature community. The project gives them a meaningful reason to communicate, make decisions, plan, organize, negotiate with teammates, solve problems, and adapt when things don't go according to plan.
Each week would build both the project and a different set of skills:
Week 1 – We're a Team!
Communication, listening, sharing ideas, and deciding together what their community should include.
Week 2 – What's Our Plan?
Critical thinking, planning, sequencing, and organization as teams design different parts of their community.
Week 3 – Let's Build Together
Cooperation, turn-taking, task completion, and executive functioning as children begin building.
Week 4 – Uh-Oh! Plan B
Flexible thinking and problem-solving through unexpected challenges that require children to rethink their plans and find alternatives.
Week 5 – Walk in My Shoes
Perspective-taking and social problem-solving as children consider what different people might need from their community and adapt their designs.
Week 6 – Our Amazing Community
Teamwork, communication, follow-through, and reflection as children complete their project and share what they created.
Our philosophy is that children develop these skills best when they have meaningful and enjoyable problems to solve together. Rather than sitting and being taught social or executive-functioning skills, they practice them naturally while creating, playing, experimenting, and working toward a shared goal.