What Does the Word Empathy Mean?

Have you ever put yourself in someone else’s shoes and felt what they were feeling? That’s empathy – the ability to understand and share the emotions of others. It’s a crucial component of human interactions that enables us to build positive relationships, provide support and show kindness and compassion to those around us. Empathy involves emotionally connecting with other people’s experiences, even if we haven’t gone through the same situations ourselves. 

By “feeling with” or “feeling for” someone else, empathy can help us promote cooperation and understanding in various areas of life, such as personal relationships, work, and society. It’s a powerful tool that allows us to see the world from different perspectives and fosters a sense of unity and consideration for others.

Let’s Show Empathy Toward Others! 

Teaching young learners the importance of being empathetic is an important social skill. To help with this, Teach Starter has created an interactive activity for your 1st and 2nd grade students to help them practice identifying appropriate ways to respond with empathy.

In this teacher-created resource, you will find that there are 21 slides where students will identify appropriate responses to a situation and identify which actions show empathy and which do not. 

Download and Teach!

If you are ready for your students to improve their understanding of empathy, head on over to the green download button. Here you can gran the interactive Google Slides version of this resource. Before accessing the activity, you will be prompted to copy it to your personal drive.

When using this activity in your classroom, guide your students to complete the activity in “Edit” mode. This way, they will be able to drag and drop items and use the paint bucket tool to complete the questions.

This resource was created by Lindsey Phillips, a teacher in Michigan and a Teach Starter Collaborator. 

Don’t stop there! We’ve got more activities and resources that cut down on lesson planning time:  

teaching resource

Caring for Others – Printable Empathy Book

Unlock the magic of empathy by giving your students a mini-book about how to connect, understand and make a difference through the simple act of caring.

teaching resource

What Would You Do? Empathy Board Game

Challenge your students to think about the feelings of others and how to appropriately respond with the empathy board game.

teaching resource

Empathy Poster Set

Enhance student understanding of empathy and why it is important with this set of 4 classroom posters.