At Educational Diversity, we are making use of the Zones of Regulation within the whole school.
We want to teach all of our children good coping and regulation strategies so they can help themselves when they experience anxiety and stress. In the classroom and beyond. Sometimes children panic when faced with a tricky learning problem or another challenge within their day. By teaching them how to identify these feelings, we aim to support students in developing a 'tool kit' in order for them to self-regulate and build better resilience so they don’t give up so easily when faced with difficulty.
Self-regulation can go by many names such as ‘self-control’, ‘impulse management’ and ‘self-management’. It is best described as the best state of alertness for a situation for example, when you take part in a sports game, you would need to have a higher state of alertness than when, for example, working in a library.
We aim to help children to:
- Recognise when they are in the different Zones and learn how to change or stay in the Zone they are in.
- Increase their emotional vocabulary so they can explain how they are feeling.
- Recognise when other people are in different Zones, thus developing better empathy.
- Develop an insight into what might make them move into the different Zones.
- Understand that emotions, sensory experiences such as lack of sleep or hunger and their environment might influence which Zone they are in.
- Develop problem-solving skills and resilience
- Identify a range of calming and alerting strategies that support them (known as their personal ‘toolkit’.)