Year 3/4 Bulletin

Learning Intention: To identify how feelings can be expressed and understood through shared experiences.

EMPATHY - URStrong

Empathy is the intersection where self-awareness meets social-awareness. Empathy is all about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and really trying to imagine what it feels like to be them.

When it comes to friendship, empathy is essential in building and maintaining a healthy connection. Empathy helps us take stock of how our friend feels, really tuning in to their experience.

It helps us be more mindful and considerate of our friend’s perspective. Through empathy, we can build a respectful relationship and honour how other people are feeling.

Task: What is Empathy?

Beginning this term, students have been using their URStrong diaries more frequently throughout the day. This allows students to keep track of important events and dates, as well as maintaining an organisational mindset. From our URStrong Journal, students discussed and read about our key friendship concept, Empathy.

We then identified what it means to show empathy to a friend or peer at school, home or in our community. Some examples discussed included:

When you see someone alone in the playground, will you invite them to play?
When you notice your friend saying with their word, they are ok, but showing you with their body language or expression, they are not, would you help them?
When a peer or friend confides in you, will you talk to make them happy or just listen to offer support?

Students then worked independently, in pairs or in small groups to create posters with words, images or symbols to communicate their understanding of what empathy looks like and sounds like.

Below is an example of some of the posters created by the students and pages from the diaries that students have been using throughout the week.