3 No-Prep Empathy Activities for Children in Elementary School

If you’re someone like me who is a believer in incorporating daily habits to teach soft skills like empathy, then you want empathy activities for children that require little to no prep. For daily activities to be successful, they need to be sustainable, and therefore manageable for teachers. That’s why I’m sharing 3 no-prep empathy activities for children to use in your elementary classroom.

Want to have more support when it comes to teaching soft skills? Click here to download the free guide for elementary teachers looking to bring more soft skills teaching to their students.

Let’s check out some no-prep activities for children!

Activity #1- Empathy Maps

Empathy maps were created as a way for marketers to get to know their customers better. This marketing strategy can easily be adapted as a way for students to get to know other students, fictional characters and others.

Empathy maps are a visual representation of how someone speaks, thinks, acts and feels. For example, let’s say your students are doing a character description on a character from your class novel. Simply draw a rectangle with four quadrants and a circle in the middle.

Start by writing the person’s name in the circle. Then write the words “speaks,”, “thinks”, “acts” and “feels” at the top of each quadrant. Then, have students fill in each box by using words or sentences to describe the character.

Some different ways to use empathy maps in the classroom include:

After reading a fictional story and getting into the mind of a character
Getting to know their classmates better
Researching a topic for a class debate
Trying to resolve a conflict with another student
When someone is having a difficult time understanding someone else’s perspective

Activity #2-Digital task cards

Our second on the list of no-prep empathy activities for children include digital task cards

If improving students’ empathy skills is our goal, then we need to plan for students to have time to speak to one another. Discussion task cards are an easy way to spark, lead and guide a conversation amongst students.

While this resource does come with a printable PDF version, the digital task cards make it super simple and provide a no-prep option for teachers. To use the digital task cards, either display them on your classroom display board or send students the Google Slides link to use on their devices. It’s that simple!

Click here to download these digital task cards!

Want more ideas for daily habits to increase soft skills such as empathy, communication and leadership? Click here to download the soft skills guide for teachers.

Another great way to spark conversations between students is through video. Click here to read my blog post on the Brene Brown empathy video! It includes a link to the actual video!

Activity #3-Reading

You had to have known this English teacher was going to bring up reading at some point!

Now, I could go on and on about the benefits of reading. For today, however, all I’ll say is that it is one of the easiest ways for someone to practise empathy skills.

Have you ever gotten lost in a really good book? Do you know the feeling of feeling like you know the characters? The exercise of reading a fictional story is a perfect example of an empathetic-inducing activity. You are constantly putting yourself in the world of someone else. If the narrator is speaking in the first person, you are reading their thoughts.

While reading, in general, is an exercise to practice empathy, you could even take this activity a step further. To do this, choose books for your students that are read from the perspective of someone from a different culture, religion, socio-economic class or race as them.

Click here to read my blog post that shares a list of some of my favourite books for upper elementary students!