Thursday, September 5, 2013

Fourth Grade: Empathy and Respect

This week's lesson focuses on empathy and respect. I begin the lesson with Phillip Phillip's "Home" and discuss with students why I chose this song for our first lesson. I choose this song to let students know I want them to feel safe at school and comfortable during our classroom lessons. It also highlights inclusion as one of our anti-bullying rules. After discussing the song, we delved into my classroom expectations for working with students. 

To introduce the topic of empathy, I showed the students a video clip of a teacher "putting herself in a student's shoes" by morphing into a student and going out to recess. She explained how empathy helps students be respectful, and how our lessons will help students learn skills to be successful inside and outside of the classroom. After the video, we discussed what empathy means and students shared with their partners one way they can be respectful in the classroom. We also created some rules for our classroom lessons to insure we are being respectful to others. Finally, we discussed how being respectful helps us with partners, small groups, and class discussions.

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