My 5 Favorite Strategies to Teach Empathy to Kids

The dictionary defines empathy as "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another". Something I've commonly noticed in schools is that we tend to focus on getting students to understand and demonstrate kindness, but it's time we took it a step further with the teaching, learning, and demonstration of empathy.

Teaching empathy to kids can have many benefits, such as better mental and emotional health, a greater connection with their peers and educators, increased acceptance and tolerance of each other, better communication skills, promotion of social harmony, and the list goes on.

If you're looking for interesting ways to teach empathy to your students, these 5 strategies I use are sure to come in handy.

1. Teach Students to Recognize their Emotions

Many students fail to show empathy simply because they are unable to tell how another person might be feeling. When students are able to recognize and label their own emotions, they are slowly but surely going to be able to recognize similar emotions expressed by those around them.

While providing students with vocabulary is important, I love using this free Feelings Check Poster and anchor charts to help them figure out what an emotion (we go through all the common ones) looks, sounds, and feels like. Once they are able to understand that we all have emotions and that emotions are sometimes expressed by the words we say, they also learn that most other times it is through one•s body language that they are more aware of the feelings of those around them. For example, when they see a classmate crying, they are able to identify and understand that the child must be sad. This provides them an opportunity to see how they can help that child. This is the first step towards teaching a child how to show empathy.