What Should Kids Learn In Kindergarten
Without a doubt, 2020 was a difficult year for all of us. For schoolhouse-aged children, navigating the COVID-19 pandemic safely as well entailed adjusting to virtual learning and distancing from their friends. Just as many students return to the classroom — and every bit some enter a classroom for the offset time — another hurdle looms. Just like adults, kids will have to learn to be around other people again, including peers with identities and experiences that differ from their own.
With this in mind, it's important to develop strategies to teach kids empathy and kindness early on, peculiarly equally they brainstorm to socialize in person over again. Activities like office-playing and reading are only a few ways to assistance students connect with their emotions equally well as the emotions of others. Here, we've rounded up a few great activities that teach empathy — for kids and adults.
Students Tin Emotionally Connect to Characters in Stories
Having story time with younger children or offering new reading material to older children tin can be a cracking opportunity for children to learn empathy. If illustrations are used in the story, you lot can meet if younger kids can proper name the emotions of the characters' faces. Inquire the children how these characters might exist feeling and if they have ever felt the same way (scared, excited, etc.). Additionally, let them see that you are concerned for or connected to the characters equally well so they can see that it'due south of import to care for the well-existence of others.
For kids who are older, teachers or parents can provide special questions or journal prompts to better sympathise the characters in their books. The questions may enquire scholars to imagine what the characters might feel when making different choices or in their current circumstances.
Older Children Can Write Out Feelings in an Emotion Periodical
An emotion journal is a great way for kids to begin to connect with their own feelings. Teachers and parents akin can incorporate periodical time at a certain point in the solar day to permit them to write nigh their highs and lows.
Children can share parts of their journal entries with their peers if they are comfortable. Ultimately, writing out their feelings (and maybe sharing them with others) allows them to larn to limited themselves healthily. If kids talk over their feelings — or let them out in a healthy way — they tin begin to build empathy by relating to each other.
Random Acts of Kindness or Volunteering Volition Encourage Kids to Bear witness Empathy
Doing random acts of kindness or taking part in a volunteer experience will help kids learn to think about other people's feelings, and perhaps put them alee of their own. Teachers or parents can create a jar or chart where a educatee tin rail one act of kindness completed during the week.
It's also swell for children to discuss how being kind makes people feel good as opposed to bullying or mean acts that make people feel bad. Their behavior can be reinforced as well by talking about how volunteering or the act of kindness made them feel equally well. Likely, they volition be excited and happy that something they did helped someone else.
Children Tin can Create 'Feelings Collages' to Learn Emotions
For younger kids, especially those who are shy and placidity, creating a "feelings collage" will aid them express their emotions. With this unique collage, they can learn to read faces, body language, and the emotions of others as well.
Children can cut and glue pictures from magazines onto poster boards or construction paper. These pictures would have people expressing whatever kind of feeling (happiness, sadness, fear, etc.). Kids could fifty-fifty characterization the images they glue with a feeling word, and, afterwards, share with their peers if desired. The collages can be used at school or dwelling to practice identifying and labeling feelings. If they want to really get creative, kids can try their manus at creating drawings of different people with various emotions.
Imaginative Roleplay Helps Students See Emotions in Real Life
Roleplaying allows kids to run across circumstances from a completely different perspective than their ain. Teachers or parents can encourage children to pace into the shoes of someone dissimilar from them, asking them near different scenarios like, What if you were at a new school without whatsoever friends? or If you saw someone getting bullied, what would you exercise — and how would you feel?
While watching someone human activity out a "role," other kids could chime in about the faces or body language of the person. This allows them to acquire to read people better, which can be a major pro in the future as an adult. Roleplaying like this actually helps put circumstances into perspective and fifty-fifty helps modify behaviors. Plus, younger kids beloved to play pretend, then it'south a win-win!
Teachers and Parents Should Model Empathy to Kids
You've certainly heard of the proverb, "Exercise as I say, not as I exercise." That will certainly not help teach empathy. While kids may pick upward some practiced habits that are taught by parents, teachers, and other authorisation figures, children model what they see, fifty-fifty if the adult isn't aware that they're being observed. Kids are ever paying attention, so information technology's important to model empathetic beliefs as much equally possible.
For example, teachers should be mindful of their interactions with other adults whether in-person or on screen. Parents should exist careful non to snap at or belittle each other or their children at dwelling. While trying to completely avoid conflict is incommunicable, how we speak to and treat each other matters.
Resource Links:
- "Developing Empathy: 8 Strategies & Worksheets for Becoming More Compassionate" via Positive Psychology
- "20+ Strategies for Teaching Empathy" via Pathway 2 Progress
- "Empathy Activities" via Education Development Centre
- "5 Activities for Building Empathy in Your Students" via Brookes Weblog
Source: https://www.symptomfind.com/healthy-living/activities-that-teach-empathy?utm_content=params%3Ao%3D740013%26ad%3DdirN%26qo%3DserpIndex
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