Health & Wellness
The Compassion Project
- Mindfulness
- Mistakes & Self-Care
- Practicing Compassion
- Self Compassion
- Teaching Empathy Activities
- Understanding Compassion
Why Adopt This Course?
Build essential social-emotional skills that create stronger classroom communities with The Compassion Project, a comprehensive empathy curriculum that has been helping elementary educators since 2018. This research-backed program teaches students the complex but critical skill of compassion through engaging, age-appropriate lessons that fit seamlessly into your existing curriculum.
Compassion education strengthens your classroom environment by helping students develop key social-emotional learning competencies including self-awareness, social awareness, and relationship skills. Students who learn empathy early show increased wellbeing, stronger peer relationships, and greater understanding of diverse perspectives—creating the foundation for inclusive learning environments where all students can thrive.
With interactive online activities and complete offline lesson plans, The Compassion Project gives you practical tools to teach these essential skills with minimal prep time required.
At-A-Glance
Grade Level
2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6thLength
6 digital lessons, 18 offline lessons, 10-30 minutes per lesson
Languages
Standards
Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts (CCSS – ELA), Social Emotional Learning (SEL)
Curriculum Fit
Advisory, Homeroom
What’s included in this compassion course?
The compassion project consists of six lessons, three geared towards lower elementary school students (2nd-4th graders) and three geared towards upper students (4th-6th graders).
The Lower Elementary Compassion Course has three online lessons; Compassion Playground, EmpathEyes, and Mindful Maze.
The Upper Elementary Compassion Course also has three online lessons; Compassion & Empathy, Mistakes & Self-Care, Emotions & Mindfulness.
You can explore all of the compassion lessons below in detail.
Before students can understand how to act more compassionately, they must first develop a foundational understanding of the concept. In this lesson, compassion is taught in context so that young learners are able to relate it to their own personal experiences.
Understanding how someone else feels is a key building block to being more compassionate. Through perspective-taking exercises and interactive activities, students connect the dots between empathy and compassion.
The technique of calmly paying attention to the present moment, or being mindful, helps improve self-regulation and sense of well-being. Students learn different mindfulness exercises in this lesson and think about how practicing mindfulness may help their daily routines.
Explore the 15 offline companion lessons to bring these topics to life in your classroom. Create your teacher account to download the free Comprehensive Implementation Guide from the teacher center.
In this lesson, students are introduced to definitions and depictions of compassion and related concepts, emphasizing that compassion can be a learned behavior. Students are encouraged to observe instances of compassion in their school and home lives.
In this lesson, students learn that making mistakes is normal and that having a growth mindset and compassion for oneself is healthy. They also learn about the importance of self-care.
In this lesson, students learn about the role our emotions play in demonstrating or choosing not to demonstrate compassion, emphasizing that our emotions are within our control and can be managed and channeled for good.
Explore the 3 offline companion lessons to bring these topics to life in your classroom. Create your teacher account to download the free lesson plans from the teacher center.
Why EVERFI?
EVERFI empowers educators to bring real-world learning into the classroom and equip students with the skills they need for success-now and in the future. Our curriculum and courses are:
- Loved by 750,000+ teachers
- Aligned to US, Canada, and UK learning standards.
- Real-world lessons that are self-paced and interactive.
- Automatically graded with built-in assessments and reporting.
- Extendable with activities and resources to bring the information to life.
- Supported with a dedicated, regional team.
- Forever free for K-12 educators.
How Are These Lessons Free?
Thanks to the generous sponsorship of corporations who share our mission, EVERFI’s courses are completely free to teachers, districts, and families