Emotional Awareness and Regulation

A child at James Wolfe aims to become a healthy, responsible, independent and confident citizen that contributes positively to our diverse society.

A Lantern to the Emotional Spectrum - Reception

Reception have used the book ‘The Colour Monster’ to introduce the link between emotions and the colours used in our ‘Zones of Regulation’ work. They are exploring each emotion carefully, starting with green to identify what that looks like when learning and engaging in the classroom, and red to identify what a heightened dysregulated state looks like in the learning environment and beginning to introduce strategies to bring themselves from red to green. They will explore yellow and blue across the rest of this term.

Now it’s Personal - Year 2

After introducing the zones and explaining what each of them means, Year 2 have been creating a bank of synonyms for each of the zones so that the children can use language that they are already familiar with  to describe their emotions and apply them to the zones.
This is allowing the children to place themselves within the zones throughout the day, with support from adults, while they are still developing their understanding of the language of the zones of regulation.

Emotional Journeys - Year 3

Year 3 have been developing their objective understanding of the zones of regulation and beginning to apply that learning to their own emotional experience throughout the day. They have begun journaling after identified emotional points n the day (after lunch and afternoon play) to look for patterns in their personal journey through the zones of regulations throughout the day with the goal to mitigate times when children find themselves in the red zone.

Identification and Optimisation - Year 6

Building on the identification and understanding of the ‘Zones of Regulation’, Year 6 have been focusing on creating a bank of  techniques to support themselves when they find themselves in each zone. They have built both a whole class and personal collection of strategies of what to do when they identifying themselves in a particular zone. That includes how to maximise success when they are working in the green zone, which gives equal weight to each of the zones, rather than a focus on just leaving the red zone.