2018 Pioneer Schools on Empathy Day
Pioneer Schools on Empathy Day 2018
We are working with 11 pioneer schools to test an in-depth, year-round programme.
On Empathy Day they brought a year’s work to a head. The resources underpinning their activities will be available to other schools once we’ve completed our testing and evaluation. See how their days went below!
Our pioneer primary school partners are carefully trialling our
Empathy Awards
idea. We hope to roll this out fully in 2019. Children nominate and vote for book characters showing exceptional empathy, or characters which make the reader feel empathy.
Beck Primary School, Sheffield
At Beck we celebrated Empathy Day in many ways! Teachers dressed up as characters and children came to school in their smartest clothes.
There were also Parent Empathy Reading Cafés where parents had the opportunity to come and read different stories with their children and complete empathy activities.
During the afternoon, teachers took children who act as Empathy Leaders in the playground to the local Firth Park Library to participate in a community workshop with author Sita Brahmachari.
Alan Macdonald visited school to share stories with an empathy focus. There were three finalists per year group from Year 2 to Year 6.
They voted for their chosen character with the winner being announced during the Empathy Awards, hosted by Alan.
The students and teachers helpfully identified the following characters as showing fantastic empathy!
Foundation: Wilbur from Winnie the Witch
by Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul
Year 1: Zog from Zog
byJulia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
Year 2: Charlie Bucket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
by Roald Dahl
Year 3: Bird from Penguin in Peril
by Helen Hancocks
Year 4: Bear from Rainbow Bear
by Michael Morpurgo and Michael Foreman
Year 5: Boy from A Child's Garden
by Michael Foreman
Year 6: Highwayman from The Highwayman
by Alfred Noyes and Charles Keeping
International Community School, London
Our Year 7 students read biographies of people from the past and present and wrote creatively to try to gain insights into their diverse experiences. On June 11th these students visited our Primary School.
After a warm-up activity to remind students of the meaning of empathy and how to ask open questions, our students were ‘Living Books’ in a ‘Living Library’. The younger students read a brief description of each Living Book and then withdrew one for a 15 minute conversation where they could find about that person’s life.
They also had the opportunity to ‘meet’ Mary Shelley, Gandhi, a refugee, a hostage survivor and Malala Yousafzai amongst others. Meanwhile their classmates took part in an Empathy board game designed by MYP1.
On the day itself we were lucky to have two storytellers from The Embers Collective who worked with students across the school to develop stories from alternative perspectives, with a focus on empathy.
At the end of the day we came together so that students could perform their stories to each other and so that we could celebrate the range of empathy-focused activities we have taken part in throughout the year.
Netley Marsh Church of England Infant School, Southampton
Students at Netley Marsh participated in the Empathy Awards. And the winner was... Perfectly Norman
by Tom Percival!
Bewick Bridge Community School, Cambridge
To celebrate Empathy Day, the whole school looked at the book They All Saw a Cat by Brendan Wenzel (from the 2017 Read For Empathy Guide).
The Spinney School, Cambridge
The Spinney School’s exciting Empathy Day activity was a shared celebration with Bewick Bridge
Community School.
The whole of Key Stage 2 from the Spinney School - 120 children - walked to Bewick Bridge for an afternoon of sharing, connecting and empathy excitement!
This included an author workshop by Ross Montgomery and Empathy Award winner presentations. Spinney children had sent Bewick Bridge children some Empathy Explorer postcards recommending books they could read and enjoyed chatting with children from another school about the work they have been doing. Also the winner of The Big Read and Write was announced. This was a writing competition launched by author Jo Cotterill following The Kite TSA and Empathy Lab author event in March.
During the last half-term at The Spinney, each class was involved in EmpathyLab’s idea for Empathy Awards. They focused on spotting book characters that show empathy and in particular characters that show exceptional empathy. Each class together decided on a short list and then children worked in groups to prepare presentations arguing why and how their character shows the most empathy. Each class had a vote and a winning character was announced.
We held a whole school Empathy Awards on Thursday 7th June where the winning groups from each class presented their character, and we had a whole school vote. The winning character then presented their argument at Bewick Bridge and prizes were given. The children loved wearing their Empathy Explorer glasses, talking about characters and sharing ideas.
We used this to revisit our work on perspective-taking undertaken earlier in the year.
After reading the book together, children created pieces of art and/or poetry based on the book and shared this with peers in other classes to discuss their take on things.
Miles commented, 'Even though the cat doesn't change, all the animals see it slightly differently depending on how the cat makes them feel'.
In the afternoon, we were joined by fellow pioneer school, The Spinney School, for a very special author visit from Ross Montgomery, who led a workshop for children in Years 3-6.
After that, we hosted our Empathy Awards ceremony, presenting prizes to our winners, and testing this EmpathyLab idea.
The winners were book characters who have been nominated by children with careful justification as to how these characters have either shown great empathy or help readers develop empathy.
Delna and Rivena won with an excellent presentation on how Cinderella had:
a) demonstrated empathy towards others in the story.
b) helped develop their understanding of how Cinderella (and others in similar situations of oppression, injustice and hardship) might feel and why.
In doing this, we built on our work with EmpathyLab all year around, developing empathy by getting to know different characters in different situations and reflecting on how that helps us better understand different perspectives.
Robert Ferguson Primary School, Carlisle
It was a busy, fun-packed day on June 12th.
We were delighted to welcome Morag Hood who ran workshops with our Reception children and also took part in our Empathy Awards assembly. At this special assembly, Year 5 children talked about empathy and the empathy book character winners were announced.
Later in the morning, parents were invited to join us for coffee to share empathy-boosting books with their children and also to pick up ideas for reading at home together.
We had a giant paper empathy wall with contributions from each class, including displays of empathy work and all of us made an empathy promise, pledging to put empathy into action.
The day finished with a visit from artist Gillian Naylor who ran a screen-printing workshop with Year 6 called 'Walking in their Shoes'. Using shoes and Andy Warhol as inspiration the children created a piece of art that symbolises empathy.
Kenilworth Primary School, Borehamwood
The students at Kenilworth enjoyed having author Robin Stevens to visit and participated in the Empathy Awards. Some pupils worked on empathising with the white crayon from The Day the Crayons Quit
by Oliver Jeffers.
St Hilda's, Bushey
We made a special empathy collection of books in the library (with questions in the front to help parents and staff get the most out of using the book) - mainly picture books but across the primary age range.
For Empathy Day, each class was designated a book from the collection and presented it in any way they chose for 5 minutes in an assembly. Our Empathy Club made a tree - they wrote on the leaves when they spotted a person being empathetic.
Our Reception children loved Oliver Jeffers' Lost and Found
and it helped build their emotional vocabulary as they discussed how the boy and the penguin felt as the story unfolded.
Year 1 explored Olive and the Embarrassing Hat
by Tor Freeman - they learnt a lot about the feelings of Olive and Joe. Avni said 'At first, Olive did not show any empathy ...'
Year 2 looked at Amy MacDonald's Little Beaver and the Echo. Nilou said that 'the echoes show how he feels and the echoes are like mirrors reflecting our feelings'.
Year 4 presented ideas about being afraid and brave with Alicia Potter's Miss Hazeltine's Home for Shy and Fearful Cats.
Year 5 looked at perspective-taking with Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne. Rheya commented that 'The colours in the book cleverly help readers understand how everyone feels - Smudge is open and everything around her is bright summer'. Kathryn said, 'I loved this book - it really helped me to understand the phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" and what the word "prejudice" means'.
This is Year 6 walking in someone else's shoes - inspired by Four Feet, Two Sandals
by Karen Lynn Williams and Khadra Mohammed.
They had an amazing range of ideas (walking in each others shoes/no shoes, charity clothes collection ideas, drama, news reporting).
Year 6 loved this book as it taught them a lot about refugees (research linked to Deborah Ellis' The Breadwinner
and news articles about refugee camps). It made them feel lucky to be where they are.
Kimi said that she felt so grateful for her home and would donate to clothes charities collecting for refugees.
Millie said that walking in someone else's shoes really helped her to understand their life.
Moorlands C of E Primary Academy, Norfolk
We were delighted to welcome author Jo Cotterill on Empathy Day. Jo worked with Year 6, looking at empathy in stories (mostly her own) and why having characters we empathise with in books are so important. She also led a whole-school assembly on empathy.
Key Stage One and children from Deer Class organised the first Moorlands Empathy Awards. They had been looking at picture books with 'empathy characters' in and choosing a shortlist of 6.
On Empathy Day, KS1 and Deer Class worked together to produce a short presentation about each character and made a model of each character to present to the rest of school.
Each of the six shortlisted characters were listed on a ballot slip, everyone voted, including teachers and staff, and then the results were shared in a special assembly.
Exciting stuff!
Other classes did various activities around the theme of friendship using poetry from The Same Inside
collection by Liz Brownlee, Matt Goodfellow, and Roger Stevens; drama based around various picture books; and also creating empathetic characters.
Each class had different plans and there were lots of cross-class activities too.
Lots of empathy day action for everyone!
Coddington C of E Primary School, Newark
At Coddington, reading nooks were set up at the beginning and the end of the day – these were places where parents/carers and children could go to read, share a book and enjoy some quality time together as they settled down to #ReadforEmpathy.
We held a school assembly to introduce everything and then again at the end of the school day to bring everyone together, enabling pupils to share with the whole school what they did and read.
We welcomed into our school some pupils from a local secondary school, Sir William Robertson Academy
– many of these are past pupils from Coddington so there was a positive, family atmosphere throughout the day. The pupils prepared activities based on books they chose, including writing postcards and using the Empathy Glasses. At lunchtime our pupils shared books with Coddington pupils in a special reading area.
We also set up a display area (to compliment the display we already have in the school hall) and populated it with lots of images from the day and some examples of work.
Overall it was an engaging and lively day with lots of engagement from pupils (past and present), parents and teachers! We also loved having our visiting author!
We were on the radio on Empathy Day! Listen here
from 2hr 21minutes in....
St. Michael's Primary School, Rochdale
We also participated in the Empathy Awards. But empathy does not just stop at Empathy Day. To fit into our project on WW1, we have got plans to use titles such as A Medal for Leroy by Michael Morpurgo about the black officer who faced racism for looking different, and Captain
by Sam Angus which features a refugee's story.
