How To Make Friends At A New School: 5 Helpful Ideas
How to make friends at a new school is a significant concern for students regarding their development in social skills, attitude to education and learning, and better sense of belonging and community. However, changing schools can be scary, and children often struggle to enter new classes. This article provides an ideal guide for new students to make friends in school.
1. Start Conversations
To learn how to make friends at a new school, you should learn how to start a conversation. Here’s a friendly guide to help you:
- Make eye contact and smile: Smiling and providing simple eye contact can help a lot on how to make new friends at school. It helps people know that they can come to you and talk with you without hesitation.
- Approach someone who is alone: Just by identifying a single person who is either sitting or standing and completely alone, then you can get the conversation started.
- Introduce yourself: Just simply start off with something like greeting by saying hello and then introducing yourself by stating. This is an important point about how to make friends at a new high school, especially when joining a new school.
- Ask open-ended questions: Use questions that need more than a single-word reply, such as ‘What is your favorite subject at school?’ It can be used to sustain the conversation.
- Listen actively during the conversation: Active listening can be key in getting interaction and attention to the people you want to talk with.
2. Join Clubs
Joining clubs is the best way to make friends, particularly for high-school students who have transferred to a new campus. High school activities like clubs, academics, and sports teams are welcoming for newcomers.
Besides making friends at school, joining a club can also inform you about things you’re interested in. Participating in various clubs simultaneously gives students more chances to connect with more friends while obtaining new skills. Besides, being a club member offers competitive advantages when it comes to applying to colleges.
At ISHCMC, ASA program provides numerous opportunities for extracurricular activities for primary and secondary students, supporting students in making friends in a new high school. Check out the various school clubs at ISHCMC.
3. Extend Your Network Circle
To truly understand how to make new friends in high school, broadening your range of connections outside your peers is much more effective. Here are some tips to help you broaden your circle:
- Start with your classmates: To make friends in high school, pay attention to your peers’ interests, such as books or questions. Connecting with people with similar interests can be easy, making them an excellent resource for learning new skills.
- Attend school events: Dances, concerts, and sports games are great ways to make friends at new school. You never know who you will meet if you miss these opportunities.
- Play sports: Exercise is a highly effective social activity on how to make friends in a new high school. Participating in sports teams or clubs allows for creating relationships through shared goals and teamwork, making it an enjoyable and effective way to expand one’s network.
- Try to be friendly with your friend’s friends: Students can expand their relationships with their friends’ friends because they are likely to share interests like love, music, or similar hobbies. Consequently, it can improve the capability of hanging out with more friends and alleviate student burden.
4. Connect With Peers Over Social Media
Regarding how to make friends at a new high school, utilizing social media allows students to share their interests with new acquaintances at school. They may be able to interact with such folks and spark conversations by joining Facebook groups or Instagram profiles.
Additional activities, such as playing games or viewing movies via Zoom, might also help students connect with more friends in a new school. Do not simply sit and wait for someone to participate in these activities; you may need to invite him or her.
5. Be a Good Friend
To make friends in a new school, it’s best to be a good friend first. Here’s how:
- Show kindness: Kindness will enable you to make friends easily in a new school by allowing those around you to feel at ease with you. That is why individuals are irresistibly attracted to cheerful and friendly individuals.
- Tell jokes: Humor is very good at creating friendship. It is as easy as forwarding a silly joke to change a perception that you are not friendly or approachable.
- Be respectful: Respect is fundamental to honor because establishing trust creates the basis of any relationship. Remember to show this clearly to your friends as one way to accept the differences among others.
- Be patient: Friendships take time; hence, do not pressure any of the processes or even feel angry if things do not change overnight. Do not hurry things and allow enough time to develop meaningful relationships with the people.
- Be yourself: Finally, the message that needs to be conveyed always has to be real. People will accept you for what you are, and that is how you will make friends at a new school.
Join the diverse community at ISHCMC to expand friendship
It is not always easy to meet new friends but with appropriate strategies, one can understand how to make friends at new school. In this case, they hold that to establish a social circle, you need to initiate conversations, get membership with certain clubs, and be your natural self. Do not rush, and always learn from every opportunity that comes your way.
At ISHCMC, you will have numerous ways to make new friends – academically, through games, and through after-school activities. If you are willing to be a part of the school where students remain our priority and friendship is at the highest level, apply now and learn how to make friends in ISHCMC.