Empathy Activities for Kids (12-Page Unit, PDF)

About this resource

What's inside this resource

A month-long empathy unit for early-elementary classrooms opens with a teacher planning page defining empathy, listing suggested read-aloud picture books, and linking a related video, then follows with an 'Empathy Act' partner activity where one student mimes an emotion for a classmate to guess and respond to, plus a bank of everyday classroom scenarios (a dropped pencil, a lost turn on the swing, a lunch mix-up) for role-play skits. A letter home to caregivers explains the empathy focus and recommends picture books to read together, and a set of illustrated scenario cards asks students to identify how a character feels and how they could show empathy. The unit closes with several near-identical practice pages built on the sentence frame 'My friend is [sad/mad/lonely/happy]. I say, "Are you ok?"' (or 'yay!' for the happy version), for students to complete or copy. The read-aloud list includes an Amazon affiliate purchase link for the recommended books.

In the classroom

Teaching tips & learning objectives

Learning objectives

Define empathy as noticing how someone feels and trying to help them feel better
Identify a character's or classmate's emotion from a described or illustrated scenario
Practice an empathetic verbal response using a sentence frame such as 'Are you ok?'
Role-play a classroom scenario as both the person with the feeling and the empathetic responder

Teaching tips

Use the Empathy Act partner activity as a warm-up before assigning the illustrated scenario cards, since both use the same acting-out-and-guessing structure
Send the caregiver letter home at the start of the unit so families can reinforce the same read-aloud books discussed in class
Draw extra scenarios from real situations observed in your own classroom rather than relying only on the provided list, as the teacher page itself suggests
Assign the repeated sentence-frame pages ('My friend is sad/mad/lonely/happy') across separate days, one emotion at a time, since they are otherwise identical in format

Skills covered

Emotion identification — students name how a classmate or character feels from a described or illustrated scenario, such as a student who lost a favorite pencil.
Empathetic response practice — students complete the sentence frame 'My friend is [feeling]. I say, ___' for sad, mad, lonely, and happy scenarios.
Role-play and perspective-taking — in pairs, one student acts out an emotion while the other guesses the feeling and proposes a way to help.
Read-aloud discussion — teachers use suggested picture books to prompt discussion of how story characters show empathy.

Good to know

Questions teachers ask about this resource

How are the caregiver letter and classroom activities meant to work together?

The letter home asks families to read the same suggested empathy picture books at home and discuss characters' feelings, mirroring the read-aloud discussion and role-play activities used in class during the unit.