Year 5 - Resolving conflict

On Tuesday, Year 5 students explored how they could develop coping strategies to deal with conflict. The children identified that differing viewpoints or refusing to apologize are common sources of conflict between friends. We discussed different words relating to conflict such as ‘dispute’ and ‘squabble’ and the children worked in partners to rank these terms in order of severity.

Following this, the children were given a variety of statements such as ‘Children should get more homework’ and were asked to discuss these in partners or small groups. They used their reciprocity skills to make sure that they debated these points and took turns to support these claims from the ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ side. From this, we created useful sentence stems that the children could use to disagree without arguing.

Morgan’s reflection from the lesson was; ‘I have learnt that we all think differently. I will use the strategy 'just talk it out' in future because I think that this is one of best methods to resolve conflict.'