30 Of The Best Books To Teach Children Empathy
Being told through narrators, most stories naturally promote empathy with characters. These are some of the best books to teach children empathy.

What Are The Best Books To Teach Children Empathy?
by TeachThought Staff
Often confused with sympathy and compassion, empathy is, put simply, the ability to feel what another person is feeling. Unlike sympathy or compassion, empathy doesn’t require you to feel for them, though it can lead to those emotions. Empathy, rather, is a starting point for understanding both ourselves and other people from the inside out.
The point is that there’s an important difference between empathy and sympathy.
In How To Teach Empathy, Terry Heick said that “empathy is both a cause and effect of understanding, a kind of cognitive and emotional double helix that can create a bridge between classroom learning and ‘real-life’ application.”
Since storytelling is such a powerful tool to communicate the human condition, we’ve created a list of 30 stories that do exactly that. Each of the following books in the collection we’ve created below was selected for the ability to provide an especially apt demonstration of, or opportunity to learn, empathy.
Most of the books are useful to teach empathy to almost any student of any age. In fact, it could be argued that a student doesn’t need a story at all–music, the news, art, film, YouTube videos, and other media forms are also useful here. It’s also true that they don’t necessarily need an ’empathy story.’
Most literature, by design, promotes empathy with characters in stories, especially when told through a first-person narrator. Still, a book created expressly to showcase empathy can be an even more precise teaching tool. Though the list below tends towards K-8, there are many that would work well in a high school classroom as well.
The following links may be affiliate links. You can read more about our affiliate policy here.
Going to school and making new friends can be tough. But going to school and making new friends while wearing a bulky hearing aid strapped to your chest? That requires superpowers! In this funny, poignant graphic novel memoir, author/illustrator Cece Bell chronicles her hearing loss at a young age and her subsequent experiences with the Phonic Ear, a very powerfulโand very awkwardโhearing aid.
The Phonic Ear gives Cece the ability to hearโsometimes things she shouldnโtโbut also isolates her from her classmates. She really just wants to fit in and find a true friend, someone who appreciates her as she is. After some trouble, she is finally able to harness the power of the Phonic Ear and become โEl Deafo, Listener for All.โ And more importantly, declare a place for herself in the world and find the friend sheโs longed for.
August Pullman was born with a facial difference that, up until now, has prevented him from going to a mainstream school. Starting 5th grade at Beecher Prep, he wants nothing more than to be treated as an ordinary kidโbut his new classmates canโt get past Auggieโs extraordinary face. Wonder, now a #1 New York Times bestseller and included on the Texas Bluebonnet Award master list, begins from Auggieโs point of view, but soon switches to include his classmates, his sister, her boyfriend, and others. These perspectives converge in a portrait of one communityโs struggle with empathy, compassion, and acceptance.
The author of the beloved One for the Murphys gives readers an emotionally-charged, uplifting novel that will speak to anyone whoโs ever thought there was something wrong with them because they didnโt fit in. โEverybody is smart in different ways. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its life believing it is stupid.โ
4. 365 Days of Wonder: Mr. Browne’s Precepts
n Wonder, readers were introduced to memorable English teacher Mr. Browne and his love of precepts. This companion book features conversations between Mr. Browne and Auggie, Julian, Summer, Jack Will, and others, giving readers a special peek at their lives after Wonder ends. Mr. Browneโs essays and correspondence are rounded out by a precept for each day of the yearโdrawn from popular songs to childrenโs books to inscriptions on Egyptian tombstones to fortune cookies.
Having spent twenty-seven years behind the glass walls of his enclosure in a shopping mall, Ivan has grown accustomed to humans watching him. He hardly ever thinks about his life in the jungle. Instead, Ivan occupies himself with television, his friends Stella and Bob, and painting. But when he meets Ruby, a baby elephant taken from the wild, he is forced to see their home, and his art, through new eyes.
See also 10 Team-Building Games For A Friendlier Classroom
With honesty and humor, the main characters bridge the miles between them, creating a friendship that inspires bravery and defeats cultural misconceptions. Narrated in two voices, each voice distinctly articulated by a separate gifted author, this chronicle of two lives powerfully conveys the great value of being and having a friend and the joys of opening our lives to others who live beneath the same sun.
Inside Out and Back Again is a New York Times bestseller, a Newbery Honor Book, and a winner of the National Book Award! Inspired by the authorโs childhood experience of fleeing Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon and immigrating to Alabama, this coming-of-age debut novel told in verse has been celebrated for its touching childโs-eye view of family and immigration.
8. Sunborn Rising: Beneath the Fall
Cerulean is on the brink of collapse. The decay wasnโt fast, it wasnโt obvious, but now the world stands on the precipice. Woven forests floating on an ocean around a star, Ceruleanโs once vibrant treescape has grown dim over generations of arboreal life, and the creatures of the forest have forgotten the light.
9. The Family Under the Bridge
This is the delightfully warm and enjoyable story of an old Parisian named Armand, who relished his solitary life. Children, he said, were like starlings, and one was better off without them. But the children who lived under the bridge recognized a true friend when they met one, even if the friend seemed a trifle unwilling at the start. And it did not take Armand very long to realize that he had gotten himself ready-made family; one that he loved with all his heart, and one for whom he would have to find a better home than the bridge.
Life carried on for the community of Port William, Kentucky, as some boys returned from the war and the lives of others were mourned. In her seventies, Nathanโs wife, Hannah, has time now to tell of the years since the war. In Wendell Berryโs unforgettable prose, we learn of the Coulterโs children, of the Feltners and Branches, and how survivors โlive right on.โ
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a childโs soul as she searches for her place in the world.
12. Island of the Blue Dolphins
โIsland of the Blue Dolphinsโ is an adventure of the spirit that will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down. Karanaโs quiet courage, her Indian self-reliance and acceptance of fate, transform what to many would have been a devastating ordeal into an uplifting experience. From loneliness and terror come strength and serenity in this Newbery Medal-winning classic.
Jayber Crow, born in Goforth, Kentucky, orphaned at age ten, began his search as a โpre-ministerial studentโ at Pigeonville College. โYou have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them outโperhaps a little at a time.โ
Little Man throws the meanest fastball in town. But talking is a whole different ball game. He can barely say a word without stutteringโnot even his own name. So when he takes over his best friendโs paper route for the month of July, heโs not exactly looking forward to interacting with the customers. But itโs the neighborhood junkman, a bully and thief, who stirs up real trouble in Little Manโs life.
15. The Boy on the Wooden Box: How the Impossible Became Possible
This, the only memoir published by a former Schindlerโs list child, perfectly captures the innocence of a small boy who goes through the unthinkable. Leon Leyson (born Leib Lezjon) was only ten years old when the Nazis invaded Poland and his family was forced to relocate to the Krakow ghetto. With incredible luck, perseverance, and grit, Leyson was able to survive the sadism of the Nazis, including that of the demonic Amon Goeth, commandant of Plaszow, the concentration camp outside Krakow.
16. Night (Night)
Night is Elie Wieselโs masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elieโs wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the authorโs original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets manโs capacity for inhumanity to man.
In the town of Placid, Wisconsin, in 1871, Georgie Burkhardt is known for two things: her uncanny aim with a rifle and her habit of speaking her mind plainly. But when Georgie blurts out something she shouldnโt, her older sister Agatha flees, running off with a pack of โpigeonersโ trailing the passenger pigeon migration. And when the sheriff returns to town with an unidentifiable bodyโwearing Agathaโs blue-green ball gownโeveryone assumes the worst. Except Georgie.
18. Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood
In this groundbreaking memoir set in Ramallah during the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, Ibtisam Barakat captures what it is like to be a child whose world is shattered by war. With candor and courage, she stitches together memories of her childhood: fear and confusion as bombs explode near her home and she is separated from her family; the harshness of life as a Palestinian refugee.
19. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Pantheon Graphic Novels)
Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapiโs memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shahโs regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iranโs last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.
Billy has long dreamt of owning not one, but two, dogs. So when heโs finally able to save up enough money for two pups to call his own, heโs ecstatic. It doesnโt matter that times are tough; together theyโll roam the hills of the Ozarks. Soon Billy and his hounds become the finest hunting team in the valley. Stories of their great achievements spread throughout the region. But tragedy awaits these determined huntersโnow friendsโand Billy learns that hope can grow out of despair, and that the seeds of the future can come from the scars of the past
21. My Side of the Moutain (Puffin Modern Classics)
Terribly unhappy in his familyโs crowded New York City apartment, Sam Gribley runs away to the solitude-and danger-of the mountains, where he finds a side of himself he never knew.
22. I Hadn’t Meant Tell You This
Twelve-year-old Marie is a leader among the popular black girls in Chauncey, Ohio, a prosperous black suburb. She isnโt looking for a friend when Lena Bright, a white girl, appears in school. Yet they are drawn to each other because both have lost their mothers. And they know how to keep a secret. For Lena has a secret that is terrifying, and sheโs desperate to protect herself and her younger sister from their father. Marie must decide whether she can help Lena by keeping her secretโor by telling it.
23. The Breadwinner
The first book in Deborah Ellisโs riveting Breadwinner series is an award-winning novel about loyalty, survival, families, and friendship under extraordinary circumstances during the Talibanโs rule in Afghanistan.
24. Out of My Mind
Melody is not like most people. She cannot walk or talk, but she has a photographic memory; she can remember every detail of everything she has ever experienced. She is smarter than most of the adults who try to diagnose her and smarter than her classmates in her integrated classroomโthe very same classmates who dismiss her as mentally challenged, because she cannot tell them otherwise. But Melody refuses to be defined by cerebral palsy. And sheโs determined to let everyone know itโsomehow.
Melody is not like most people. She cannot walk or talk, but she has a photographic memory; she can remember every detail of everything she has ever experienced. She is smarter than most of the adults who try to diagnose her and smarter than her classmates in her integrated classroomโthe very same classmates who dismiss her as mentally challenged, because she cannot tell them otherwise. But Melody refuses to be defined by cerebral palsy. And sheโs determined to let everyone know itโsomehow.
26. A Long Walk to Water: Based on a True Story
The New York Times bestseller A Long Walk to Water begins as two stories, told in alternating sections, about two eleven-year-olds in Sudan, a girl in 2008 and a boy in 1985. The girl, Nya, is fetching water from a pond that is two hoursโ walk from her home: she makes two trips to the pond every day. Enduring every hardship from loneliness to attack by armed rebels to contact with killer lions and crocodiles, Salva is a survivor, and his story goes on to intersect with Nyaโs in an astonishing and moving way.
27. They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan
They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky is the three boysโ account of that unimaginable journey. With the candor and the purity of their childโs-eye-vision, Alephonsian, Benjamin, and Benson recall by turns: how they endured the hunger and strength-sapping illnessesโdysentery, malaria, and yellow fever; how they dodged the life-threatening predatorsโlions, snakes, crocodiles and soldiers alikeโthat dogged their footsteps; and how they grappled with a war that threatened continually to overwhelm them.
28. The Wall (Reading Rainbow Books)
A boy and his father have come to the Vietnam War Memorial to look for the boyโs grandfatherโs name among those who were killed in the war. They find his name surrounded, but far from lost, in the rows of print that โmarch side by side, like rows of soldiers.โ โIโm proud that your grandfatherโs name is on this wall,โ says the boyโs father. The boy agrees, adding, โbut Iโd rather have my grandpa here.โ
Jess Aarons has been practicing all summer so he can be the fastest runner in the fifth grade. And he almost is, until the new girl in school, Leslie Burke, outpaces him. The two become fast friends and spend most days in the woods behind Leslieโs house, where they invent an enchanted land called Terabithia. One morning, Leslie goes to Terabithia without Jess and a tragedy occurs. It will take the love of his family and the strength that Leslie has given him for Jess to be able to deal with his grief.
30. Charlotte’s Web
E. B. Whiteโs Newbery Honor Book is a tender novel of friendship, love, life, and death that will continue to be enjoyed by generations to come. It contains illustrations by Garth Williams, the acclaimed illustrator of E.B. Whiteโs Stuart Little and Laura Ingalls Wilderโs Little House series, among many other books.
Other Books To Teach Children Empathy
30 Of The Best Books To Teach Children Empathy