Friendship Activities for TEENS: Explore fun games, engaging activities, and creative crafts that help strengthen adolescent friendships while building trust, communication, and connection. Plus, at the end of the post, you can download two free friendship activities in a handy PDF—don’t miss out!
Importance of Friendships
Interpersonal relationships play a crucial role in shaping well-being during the teenage years, as they provide support, a sense of belonging, and opportunities for personal growth.
They can also act as a protective factor, helping to buffer against mental health challenges like anxiety, depression, or negative experiences such as bullying.
Teens experience different types of relationships, from close friendships to feeling socially accepted within a group or being well-liked by peers.
Research shows that these relationships can influence future well-being in different ways depending on the stage of adolescence. For example, a study found that feeling broadly socially accepted is a stronger predictor of future well-being during early adolescence, while the quality of close friendships becomes more important in late adolescence.
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40 Fun Friendship Activities for Teens
This section offers a wide range of teen friendship activities, organized into five categories to make it easy to explore ideas based on interests or specific aspects of friendship:
- Exploring Friendship: Values and Qualities Activities
- Building Empathy and Communication Skills
- Strengthening Connection and Trust
- Conflict Resolution and Problem-Solving Activities
- Building Appreciation and Reflecting on Memories
- Creating Future Goals and Other Fun Activities/Friendship Crafts
At the end, you’ll also find suggested resources for additional support and inspiration.
Exploring Friendship Values and Qualities
- Qualities of a Good Friend Brainstorm: List the qualities of a good friend and discuss what matters most to each person. This activity helps teens understand what to value in friendships and gives them insights into how to be better friends.
- Friendship Reflection Journals: Write about what you appreciate most in friendships and share the reflections. Reflecting on positive aspects of friendship deepens gratitude and helps identify what makes friendships meaningful.
- Values Discussion: Share what each person values most in a friendship and why. This promotes mutual understanding and encourages open communication about expectations.
- Values Mapping: Map out personal values and compare them with friends to see alignments and differences. Discovering shared values strengthens bonds while understanding differences builds respect and empathy.
- Healthy Friendships vs Unhealthy Friendships: Explore the differences between healthy and unhealthy friendships by identifying behaviors that build trust, respect, and support versus those that create conflict or negativity. This activity helps teens understand what makes healthy relationships work and what to avoid to keep friendships positive.
- Exploring Different Types of Relationships: Have your students identify and explain the various types of relationships they have, such as acquaintances, best friends, and casual friends. Encourage them to describe how their interactions differ with each group, including the type of information they share and the activities they do together.
- Friendship Workbook: Discover a set of engaging friendship worksheets designed to help teenagers:
- Explore the true meaning of friendship
- Identify the qualities we value in positive friendships
- Learn how to resolve common friendship issues.
Building Empathy and Communication Skills
- Listening Game: One person talks for 2-3 minutes while others listen without interrupting, then summarize what they heard. This builds active listening skills and helps everyone feel heard and understood.
- Expressing Empathy Exercise: Practice listening to each other’s stresses or worries and respond with empathy. This teaches how to validate others’ feelings and offer emotional support effectively.
- Open Feedback Circle: Offer each other gentle, constructive feedback on how to improve as friends. This strengthens trust and fosters growth in the friendship by addressing areas for improvement.
- Boundaries Workshop: Discuss personal boundaries openly, sharing examples and why boundaries matter. Understanding each other’s limits ensures respect and prevents misunderstandings.
- Team-Building Activities: Teamwork activities are a great way to help kids develop their interpersonal and friendship skills. Examples of this type of activity include a scavenger hunt in small groups (which can be made more appealing to teens by adding creative challenges or pop culture themes) or shared story creation (modernized by writing a script for a skit or vlog).
- Guess the Emotion: Practice recognizing social cues by acting out emotions using only facial expressions and body language. Reflect on how understanding non-verbal communication helps strengthen friendships.
- Random Acts of Kindness Challenge: Each person comes up with one random act of kindness for the other. Acts of kindness enhance positivity and reinforce caring behaviors. At the end of this post, you can download a kindness challenge and a list of kindness ideas for teens.
Strengthening Connection and Trust
- Trust-Building Challenge: Try trust falls, blindfolded activities, or other trust-building exercises. These team-building games are also great friendship activities that develop trust by showing that others are there to support you, even in a vulnerable moment.
- Friendship Goal-Setting: Each person sets a goal for being a better friend and shares it with the group. This helps friends focus on intentional growth in their relationships. Another variation: Set goals for the friendship, like improving communication or spending more time together.
- Celebrate Strengths: Share one strength each friend sees in the others, with examples of how that strength has helped. This boosts confidence and reinforces positive dynamics in the friendship.
- Compliment Circle: Take turns giving each other genuine compliments to build positive communication. Compliments can strengthen bonds by showing appreciation and boosting each other’s mood.
- Shared Playlist Creation: Make a playlist of songs that remind you of each other or represent qualities you value in the friendship. This fun activity celebrates the connection through music and shared tastes.
- Friendship Game: Totem the feel-good game, Self-Esteem Game for Counseling, Team Building, Family. This is a great game to bond and build connections. It was one of my recommended self-esteem games, but it also works nicely as a friendship game. There are two decks of cards. The “Animal Card Deck” depicts animals with messages expressing “What I like about you (for example, dog: you freely express gratitude). The “Quality Card Deck” describes “Things that inspire me about you” (for example, organized, just, loyal). At the end of the game, each person would have received compliments, understood what things others admire in them, and gained a good dose of positive encouragement.
- Collaborative Projects: Work together on collaborative projects like creating a group art piece, building something, or planning an event. These activities strengthen teamwork, communication, and shared problem-solving skills.
Conflict Resolution and Problem-Solving
- Conflict Resolution Role-Play: Role-play friendship issues and discuss how you’d handle them. This prepares you to navigate real-life disagreements with empathy and problem-solving skills.
- Apology Practice: Practice apologizing by role-playing scenarios where apologies could help resolve conflicts. Learning to apologize effectively helps repair trust and maintain strong relationships.
- Guess Fake or Real Apology: Play a guessing game where your students need to figure out if an apology is real or fake. If you need some help explaining the difference between a true and a fake apology, you can check out this post: Learning to Say Sorry.
- Problem-Solving Activity: Solve a challenge together and reflect on your collaboration and communication. Working as a team builds cooperation, trust, and mutual respect.
- How to make new friends: Organise an open discussion exploring the best ways for young people to make new friends. (For example, looking for people with similar interests, joining a sports team, or participating in extracurricular activities).
- “Stand your Ground” Activity. Role-play scenarios where friends face peer pressure and practice ways to respond confidently. Reflect on how true friends respect boundaries and support healthy choices.
- Let’s Talk It Out: Toxic Friendships. Discuss the signs of toxic friendships by sharing examples and identifying behaviors that harm trust and respect. For example, constant criticism, manipulation, or disrespecting boundaries.
Building Appreciation and Reflecting on Memories
- Friendship Memory Collage: Create a collage with photos or drawings of memories, then share the stories behind them. Reflecting on shared experiences strengthens bonds and reminds you of the good times.
- Secret Notes of Appreciation: Write anonymous notes of appreciation and read them aloud, focusing on what you value. This encourages gratitude and shows how much your friends mean to you.
- Appreciation Day: Dedicate a day to showing appreciation for each other through kind words or small gestures. Taking time to show gratitude strengthens emotional connections.
- Journaling Swap: Write a journal entry on “What Friendship Means to Me,” then swap to read and discuss each other’s thoughts. Sharing reflections deepens understanding and fosters meaningful conversations.
Creating Future Goals and Fun Activities
- Bucket List Sharing: Share bucket list goals to understand each other’s motivations and interests. Learning about each other’s aspirations brings you closer.
- Friendship Bucket List Creation: Make a list of activities or goals you’d like to experience together to build future memories. Planning together strengthens your connection and gives you shared experiences to look forward to.
- Plan One-on-One Time: Suggest activities for just the two of you to reinforce the bond. Quality one-on-one time helps deepen the connection and makes each person feel valued.
- Make Room for New Connections: Enjoying your current friendships is great. But make sure you make space to meet different people. Encourage each friend to bring another friend along for group activities to expand social circles. Meeting new people together can strengthen your friendship while growing your network.
- Friendship Rocks: Paint a gratitude rock and give it to someone special as a token of friendship.
- Friendship Bracelet: Create friendship bracelets as a fun way to symbolize your bond. Each bracelet becomes a reminder of the trust, support, and shared memories that make your friendship special!
Other Interesting Resources to Support Friendship
- Social Skills Activities: Strong social skills, like effective communication, empathy, and good listening, are essential for building and maintaining healthy friendships.
Recommended resource: Social Skills Worksheets for Teens - Social Stories: Social stories, social scripts, or social narratives are short descriptions of a situation or event that also indicate the expected social behavior. These stories assist kids who struggle with reading social cues (body language, voice tone, facial expression) or with understanding commonly accepted social rules.
I hope the various friendship activities we have proposed will help you create meaningful friendships for your middle school and high school students.
You can also check more activities in our blog post: Friendship Activities for Kids.
Don’t forget to check out the Friendship Workbook for Teens in our store!
Other Social-Emotional Learning Resources
- Social Skills Workbook for Kids (50+ Fun worksheets & activities)
- List of Social Skills for Kids
- Social Skills Activities for Kids
- Assertive Communication for Kids
- Assertive Communication for Teens
- Listening Activities and Games for Kids
- Turn-Taking Activities for Kids
- Personal Space Activities
- Perspective-Taking Activities for Kids
- Empathy Activities for Kids
- Emotional Intelligence Activities for Kids
- 101 Kindness Activities for Kids
Download your Free Friendship Activities for Teens
Your free download includes the following worksheets:
- Friendship Activities- Bucket List
- Kindness Challenge + Examples of random acts of kindness
