Empathy Teaching Resources

Explore empathy activities for kids and more teacher resources for the elementary and middle school classroom, all created by teachers for teachers like you.

This collection of activities, worksheets, classroom posters and more is designed to help kids build their social awareness core competency and help you create a more positive and inclusive classroom environment.

Are you looking for help to teach empathy this school year? Read on for a primer from our teacher team, including an empathy definition for kids, empathy examples that kids can understand, and more.

What Is Empathy? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Let's start with how you can define empathy for your students. While they're likely familiar with related concepts like kindness and compassion, empathy can be a bit harder to grasp — especially for younger students.

Here's a kid-friendly definition that our teacher team uses with kids:

Empathy is when you try to understand how someone else is feeling and show you really care about their feelings. It's like putting yourself in their shoes and imagining what it would be like to be them.

When you show empathy, you also show kindness, and you try to help and support your friends and others when they need it.

What Is the Best Way to Teach Empathy?

We're often asked what the "best way" to teach a particular topic is, and we're going to be very frank. There is no best way!

We recognize that each teacher, classroom and student is different. What's best for one classroom may not be best for the next.

With that said, there are some tips and strategies that we have honed over the years that you might find helpful for incorporating empathy into your overall social awareness lesson planning.

1. Model Empathy — It all starts with you! Demonstrate to your students how to show understanding, compassion and kindness with your own actions towards your students and colleagues.
2. Mine Personal Experiences — You don't have to reveal all the details of your personal life to your students (or really any of your personal life if you don't want to). But when you're reading books aloud to students, it can be helpful to use situations you've read about as jumping-off points to say, “I so know how she feels; that used to happen to me all the time…” and share an anecdote (even if it's a bit more of an extrapolation of events). Open the discussion up to the whole class to discuss events where empathy was or was not shown.
3. Assign Empathy Journals — Encourage students to fill out empathy journals where they record times during the day that they have shown understanding, compassion and kindness towards others. Keeping an Empathy Journal is also a great opportunity for your students to reflect upon times when they did not show empathy and to consider how they might show more understanding in the future.
4. Listen Actively to Your Students —Avoid passively listening while waiting for an opportunity to interject and speak. Instead, fully concentrate and understand what is being said.
5. Teach Empathy Explicitly  — Set goals, share objectives and dedicate time to teaching and learning the skill of empathy.

Our Teacher Team's Favorite Empathy Activities for Kids

Are you looking for more specific activities to teach empathy to kids? Here are a few favorites from our teacher team! You may find these are particularly helpful activities to use to reduce bullying incidents in your classroom.

Apples and Empathy

Supplies

• 2 apples that look about the same

Instructions

1. After purchasing your apples, bang one repeatedly against a hard surface the night or morning before you bring it into class. You don't have to overdo it. The goal is not to break the skin — just bruise the insides.
2. Present the two apples to the whole class.
3. Take the apple that was not banged against the hard surface, and walk around the classroom, presenting it to each student. Ask each student to say something kind/compliment the apple.
4. Take the other apple (the one with the bruised insides), and carry it around the classroom.
5. This time, have every student say something mean to that apple.
6. Return to the front of the classroom, and cut both apples in half, revealing a nice, healthy inside for the one that received kind words and an ugly, bruised, brown inside for the one that received only unkind words.
7. Use this to lead a class discussion about how our words can affect others.

The Baggage Empathy Activity

Supplies

• An empty shopping bag
• Slips of plain paper
• Pencils

Instructions

1. Present the bag to your students, and introduce the concept of "baggage," the hurtful thoughts and feelings we carry around that others may or may not know about.
2. Hand out a blank slip of paper to each student in the classroom.
3. Encourage students to write down at least one item of "baggage" that is weighing on them. Make sure to let them know that they do not have to put their names on their paper.
4. Have students scrunch up the piece of paper into a ball and drop it into the shopping bag.
5. One by one, remove each piece of paper from the bag and read it out loud. (Alternative idea: Have students come up one by one, select a piece of paper and read it out loud.)
6. Once all the pieces of paper are read out loud, ask students to share how they feel after the exercise.