Friends Having Fun is a club at Oliver Wendell Holmes High School that creates a line of communication for special needs students.
ALE teacher Amanda Pratt-Tondre is one of the club’s advisers and she helps host the weekly event every Thursday during all lunches in rooms D211, D217, D202, and A103.
Friends having fun creates a good experience by providing interactions between general education students and students who may be more isolated from most classrooms in the Assisted Learning Environment course, providing new opportunities for making friends.
“We do it for our students and the students like it a lot. It is a good experience for them. It’s a great way for them to meet people and have fun, and make friends,” Pratt- Tondre said.
ROTC plays a big part in the club and they set up fun activities.
“ROTC is really involved with friends having fun and they come once every other week and set up activities for our students,” Pratt-Tondre said.
Friends Having Fun allows special needs students to have fun with various activities that ROTC sets up every other week and allows them to make general connections with students.
“For Halloween they brought pumpkins and they had the students paint pumpkins and the other students were interacting with our students asking them various questions like, ‘what are you going to be for Halloween?’ and suggesting ways to paint their pumpkins. They had a lot of fun with that. Any experience where my students get to interact is a good experience,” Pratt-Tondre said.
Pratt-Tondre does the program so that her students can be exposed and have the same chances that general students have and get greater experiences that help them practice for life after high school.
“Friends having fun is about exposing our special needs students to general education students. It’s about increasing their friendship, exposure, and increasing social communication skills. Those kinds of skills that most general education students already have naturally are sentencing extra practice with those independent functions. So it’s a really good way to open up that line of communication and friendship between the two student populations,” Pratt-Tondre said.
The purpose of Friends Having Fun is to give special needs students a chance for communication and practice skills that will help them later in life.
“I hope the outcome is that we sort of just make friends both ways and my students can gain those skills that they need extra help on and that they’ll need socially when they get older along with skills that they can generalize through different assets of their life and become more comfortable with socially interacting with other individuals. It’s about them having more confidence and being able to gain friendships that they wouldn’t necessarily otherwise have without the experience and doing various activities,” Pratt-Tondre said.
Friends Having Fun is a creative way that creates to help and provide opportunities for special needs kids to build skills that will help them later on in life. If you’d like to get involved, come speak with one of the ALE teachers in D211, D217, D202, or A103.