The Venn & Friend Exchange (VFE)

The Venn & Friend Exchange (VFE) matches international classrooms to build friendships, enhance literacy and communication skills, deepen cross-cultural understanding, provide active learning strategies, and allow students to explore similarities and differences in their school’s bullying prevention efforts.  

Venn & Friend began as a creative way to build upon a key component of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP), the weekly student class meetings. 

Students are matched with individual pen-pals and are later given the opportunity to meet through supervised videoconferencing, both individually and as whole class groups, for OBPP class meetings about friendship.

The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program is the world’s foremost bullying prevention program.  With over 30 years of research and successful implementation in the U.S. and abroad, this whole-school program is specifically designed to prevent and reduce bullying throughout a school setting, K-12, and has been adapted for use in non-school settings such as after-school programs.  OBPP is designed to create positive changes in students’ behavior 

and can achieve academic, social, and emotional success.

There is no cost to participate in the VFE!

For more information please contact:

vennandfriendus@clemson.edu or norway@vennandfriend.com

Visiting Pittsburgh in November 2014

In November Baard VS and Stein Gorseth attended IBPA's International Conference in San Diego, CA, and on our way home we made a stop in Pittsburgh. There we had the great opportunity to visit some of the schools we have been cooperating with and some schools that we would like to invite into our friendship project. Our host, Deb Sagan, had put a lot of effort in making an interesting and exciting program for us. We went to visit Ingomar Elemantary School in  North Allegheny and Eden Hall Upper Elemantary School in Pine Richland on Thursday and to R. Hyde Elementary School and Moon Area High School in Moon Area on Friday. It was just amazing and we were taken very well care of when we came to visit. Thank you all!

Finally at R. Hyde Elementary visiting Amber

It was very special for us being able to finally visit Amber at Hyde Elemtary as this was the first school that we started to work with back in 2011. It was just fantastic to get there and see what it really looked like and meeting Amber, the students and the staff.

Our visit at Ingomar ended up in the front page of their November edition of the school district's newsletter as well: North Allegheny newsletter