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Strategies to Help Emotional Regulation

Children cannot use the skills that they do not have and adopted and care experienced children have missed out on early opportunities to develop a range of skills. These include the skills needed for emotional literacy and emotional regulation.

Below are some ideas that teachers/education staff and children can look at together. These are strategies that can be taught and learnt, coached and practiced. They need to be taught and practised when they are calm before they can be used when emotions are running high.

String beads onto a length of wool
Talk about what I am feeling
Draw what I am feeling
Let my chest rise and fall as
I take deep breaths in an out
Chew Gum
Squeeze a stress ball
Imagine I am somewhere soothing
Put a blanket over my body
Sort a set of pencils out by colour
Colour in a picture
Lie down with my eyes closed and feel the weight of my body on the floor
Tell myself that although this is tricky I can cope and will be calm again soon
Listen to calming sounds like music, rain or white noise
Sit ona gym ball and bounce
Do a puzzle
Sit cross legged and slowly rock
Take a wlka
Stroke my hair or have someone do it for me
Feel tactile objects, like soft materials or grains

Blow bubbles
Watch a sand timer trickle down
Stretch all the muscles in my body one by one
Blow up a balloon with big puffs of air

In addition to the above ideas here are a series of ideas for teachers and education staff to cut out and make them into cards for you and the children and young people in your class to use.

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The BRIGHTER FUTURE project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.