Social & Emotional Learning (SEL)
19 Ways to Help Elementary Students Self-Regulate
These strategies can help young learners practice an essential life skill—and foster classroom harmony in the process.
August 7, 2024
School is all about giving students the skills they need to succeed. That certainly applies to reading, writing, and math, but there’s a growing understanding among elementary teachers that schools should also be teaching a more fundamental skill: self-regulation.
“I found that thinking about behavior objectively—as a skill to be taught rather than simply as good or bad—was immensely helpful in my ability to guide children in learning to control their behavior,” writes special education teacher Nina Parrish.
There are a variety of proactive steps that can help keep students composed. Regularly checking in with kids—and building relationships with them—can increase their sense of safety in the classroom and give them an opportunity to share how they’re feeling, writes educator and principal Jasmine Brann. Plus, sticking to routines and simplifying your classroom expectations can decrease the risk of outbursts born from frustration or confusion, write education researchers Donna Wilson and Marcus Conyers.
But even with these proactive practices in place, young students with still-developing brains can struggle to control their own reactions. Here are some teacher-tested strategies that can help endow elementary students with the essential, lifelong skill of self-regulation.
Teach kids about their brains: To better regulate themselves, kids need to understand what’s going on inside their heads. Educator Kathryn Fishman-Weaver recommends teaching the basic structure and function of the limbic system—the brain’s emotional control center. She uses a mnemonic device she developed to help kids distinguish different parts of the system: Hippos’ teeth have awful odor (hippocampus, thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, and olfactory bulb). Fishman-Weaver says this crash course helps kids realize not that emotions and thinking are separate processes, but rather that “feelings, thoughts, and behaviors lead to coordinated responses across the brain” that can affect students’ attention span, memory, and executive functioning.
Develop emotional vocabulary: To understand and discuss their emotions, kids need a wider emotional vocabulary, too. Fishman-Weaver challenges students to perform “feeling brainstorms,” in which they’re tasked to “think of 20 types of happy or sad.” As they generate more words and share them among each other, it’s more likely that they’ll begin to use more precise words to describe their own emotions in the future—like “anxious,” “excited,” or “satisfied.” Once students have a healthy emotional vocabulary, tools like mood meters, emotion wheels, and mood scales can help them track how their emotions change day-to-day.
Chat it out with a stuffed animal—or a plant: If students are feeling stressed, they may need to talk through their feelings—but it’s not always necessary that a human be the one listening. When educator and assistant professor of education Lori Desautels’ elementary school gave students stuffed animals to care for and chat with, “we observed a calm in many students that we had not seen before.” Similarly, a pineapple plant (nicknamed Patricia) in Lisa Tiemersma’s fourth-grade class helped calm kids down who were upset and cheer up kids who were sad.
Create a peace corner: At Fall-Hamilton Elementary in Nashville, every classroom has a designated “peace corner”—a space for kids who need to self-regulate, filled with a bean bag chair, sensory toys, stuffed animals, and charts describing calming breathing and counting exercises. Students choose when to go to the corner, and their teacher sets a five-minute timer, but the student can request more time if needed. “I’ve seen a lot of my kids this year—instead of just exploding or getting really upset—say ‘OK, I need to go to the peace corner,’” says fourth-grade teacher Whitney Holland.
Use choice time: Free choice time, when structured well, can help students learn self-regulatory skills. For example, at Charter Oak International Academy in West Hartford, Connecticut, kids can go to various areas of the classroom during free time (like “blocks” or “dramatic play”)—but if that area is at capacity, they can put their name on a waiting list. Students can ask their teacher to set a timer for when they’ll be allowed to switch into the area— “and having that visual of the time getting less and less” allows them to develop their patience, says pre-K teacher Cindy Barron.
Measure the size of a problem: To many young kids, every problem can feel huge, and therefore deserving of a huge reaction. Teachers can help students put things into perspective. For example, Washington elementary teacher Anna Parker has students rate problems—like “Someone took your pencil” and “A family member is in the hospital”—on a scale from 1 to 5 and reflect on what the appropriate response to each might be. Parker discusses calibrating responses throughout the year “so that students in the moment will think, ‘I can take a second, then I can react appropriately.’”
Use picture books: Picture books can help kids learn about emotions and how to deal with them. Educator Kristin Rydholm recommends books like Big Feelings, which “identifies and addresses the intense emotions that children sometimes experience when attempting to work collaboratively.”
Morning check-ins: Quick check-ins at the beginning of the day can help students reflect on what they’re feeling. Ask students to share one “rose” (something they’re excited about) and one “thorn” (something they’re worried or upset about), says educator Alex Venet. UCLA Graduate School of Education instructor Rebecca Alber suggests asking students to describe how they’re feeling in a single word. They might start with words like “good” or “bad,” but with more development of their emotional vocabulary, they might progress to “anxious” or “serene.”
Picture your peaceful place: A moment of mindful meditation can help kids regulate themselves. When kids are overcome by their feelings, occupational therapist Lauren Brukner recommends asking them to close their eyes and “visualize a moment or place that makes them feel the most peaceful,” like a specific room in their house or playing with a particular toy. Picturing every detail—every sound, every smell—can help calm students who are “feeling high levels of emotionality.”
Relaxing body movements: Stretching, bending, and balancing exercises provide sensory input that can help regulate strong emotions, Brukner says. During a transition period in class, for example, ask students to stand straight, then “use your right arm to help you bend your left knee toward your shoulder, and hold this position for five seconds,” before repeating it with the left arm and right knee. Desautels writes that telling students to clench and release the muscles in their hands and faces can have a similar effect.
Write down your values: When a person takes some time to reflect on and write down their core values, research shows this “improves self-esteem, executive function, and inhibitory control,” Brukner writes. She asks students to write down “10 things that define who you are and make you special.” Writing this list helps kids self-regulate in the moment, but Brukner also recommends that students keep it somewhere close so they can refer to it throughout the year, “such as next to your bed or pinned up in your workspace.” Similarly, Desautels asks students to reflect on the “anchors” in their life that stabilize them—people they care about and trust, calming places, or pets. Students can return to this list of anchors—to add to it, or just read over it—whenever they’re feeling overwhelmed.
Leverage the power of nature: Connecting kids with the natural world has wide-ranging mental benefits, research shows—including less overall stress. “If your school doesn’t have easy access to nature, you can still help students experience the magic of nature in many ways,” write Tiemersma and Brown—like growing an avocado plant from its pit, starting a school garden with calming aromatic herbs, or hanging a bird feeder near your window and tracking what different species visit it.
Positive self-talk: Students’ stress often derives from feeling like they’re not good enough—or simply unable to accomplish a given task. Teaching them to develop the habit of positive self-talk in the face of challenges can help. “Tell your students that when they have a negative thought about themselves, they can replace it with an affirmation,” suggests Brukner—like “I can totally do this!” or “I can feel proud that I’m trying my best!”
Simple breathing exercises: Breathing exercises have a calming effect, making them a great tool for self-regulation. Brukner recommends telling students, “Breathe in through your nose slowly for 4 seconds, hold, then breathe out through your mouth slowly for 6 seconds.” As an add-on, Desautels asks students to put one hand on their stomach and one hand in front of their nose: As they breathe in; they feel their stomach expand, and as they breathe out, they feel warm air hit their hand. Prompt students to “exhale away” any negative thoughts they might be feeling, Desautels says.
Sensory brain breaks: Quick brain breaks focused on sensory activities allow students to process what they’ve learned—and reduce stress, Desautels says. Here are some examples:
- Name Scribbles: Have students write their name four times with their dominant hand and four times with the other hand. Afterward, discuss how it felt; which was more difficult? Why?
- The Junk Bag: Desautels has a bag full of junk drawer items—shoelaces, markers, a can opener, etc. She picks an item from the bag and asks students to come up with two ways the object could be used outside of its intended purpose. They can write or draw their answers.
- Invisible Pictures: Pair off students, and have one draw a picture in the air while the other guesses what it is. To narrow the guessing, you can give a category like “food” or “places.”
Calming sounds: Desautels uses a variety of effective sounds in her classroom—rain sticks, bells, chimes, peaceful music—but her go-to is the Tibetan singing bowl. Sitting in a circle and breathing deeply, “students close their eyes and listen to the tone until they can’t hear it any longer,” she writes. “When this happens, they raise their hands in the air.”
Express emotions with art: Artistic activities can help kids process and express emotions, as well as “create a sense of safety and comfort, reducing stress,” writes Desautels. In one activity, she gives students a piece of paper and prompts them to fill it with various colors, lines, and shapes. She then asks students: Which color is angry? Which shape feels left out? Which lines are worried? And why? “You can ask students how their images are like them and how they are different.”
Self-regulating games: Many games require players to exhibit restraint, which can help kids develop discipline over their bodies and brains. For example, games like Red Light, Green Light and Freeze “require participants to exert self-control,” write Wilson and Conyers.
Create time to discuss: Even if you feel like you’ve given your students all the tools they need to self-regulate, some kids are bound to have difficulties. In those cases, it’s helpful to make time to chat with students one-on-one. “Kids need objective, nonjudgmental feedback in order to improve their behavior,” says Parrish. “When a problem arises, find a calm time to discuss what went wrong, why, and how it can be handled differently next time.”
