Empathy toolkit project for primary students

Abstract

This project identified the reasons why it is essential that educators directly teach the skill of empathy, explored the development of empathy and identified researched based methods for teaching empathy to primary students. Throughout the project, the British Columbia curricular and core competencies were considered and linked to lesson ideas. An empathy toolkit was created for teachers to access when teaching empathy. The toolkit consists of four sections; why it is important to teach empathy, how to integrate empathy lessons on a daily basis, classroom lessons and ways to focus on empathy at a school level.