Teaching preschoolers to recognize how others feel and show empathy is an important friendship and life skill. Use our free printable activity above and follow the lesson plan laid out below with tips and tricks for a fun preschool empathy lesson!
What You’ll Teach
Empathy is understanding how someone else feels and then taking an extra step to show them we care. Everyday Speech uses the concept Empathy Essentials to teach learners to take another’s perspective by accessing all the information they know about that person and applying it to the current situation. When we can do this, we adapt behavior to align with another’s mood, forming stronger bonds and relationships.
Free Preschool Empathy Lesson
1. Teach that We All Have Feelings
Start by discussing how we all have feelings that can change all day! We might feel differently than our classmates about the same situation, which is perfectly fine!
2. Start to Notice Clues
If you haven’t used our previous lesson, Free Identifying Feelings Lesson Plan, check it out because it can help lay the foundations for teaching empathy. It introduces The Big 3, a concept Everyday Speech uses to teach children how to notice the three main facial features that tell us the most about emotions. These are the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth. This is a simple way to teach students to watch and recognize the Big 3 for clues about how others are feeling.
3. Use our Printable Role-Play Activity
Go around the room and ask students to take turns acting out different feelings and one way to show a friend they care about those feelings. We can teach simple actions like if a friend looks sad, try to play with them or if a friend looks angry try to help them. These small actions can go a long way in life and in friendships. Download this activity at the top of this page!
Sample Video
Students learn best from watching real students their own age model skills. Try out this sample video-modeling lesson below. We offer our entire Social-Emotional Learning platform free for 30 days here!
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