4th Day of 4th Grade Celebration Back to School Activities
Have you heard about the 4th day of 4th grade celebration?!?! The first week of school is all about setting the tone for the year,
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Self-regulation is the ability to calm yourself down when you are upset and cheer yourself up when you are down. In the classroom, students may need help with self-regulating their emotions and managing their behaviors. The ability for students to learn how to manage their own emotions and behaviors can be vital for them to be able to learn in a school environment. Teaching students how to appropriately express their feelings, how to act towards others, how to handle stress, how to receive criticism, how to calm down when they are angry, or how to think positive thoughts about themselves are just some of the ways self-regulation skills are so important.
Minds in Bloom is thrilled to share this informative guest post from Sara Anderson, who works with her family to run the website Learning for a Purpose. Keep reading to learn more about various sensory strategies that you can use in the classroom to help your students practice and master self-regulation.
Managing a classroom can be difficult when you have multiple kids you are responsible for. When you have kids who are acting out and being disruptive, this can limit your ability to teach to all of the kids in the classroom. Teaching self-regulation skills to every kid in the classroom can be helpful for everyone, but especially for children who have more difficulty in this area.
Also, think about how your classroom environment is set up. Do you have enough area in the room to allow for movement breaks or a corner in the room that children can go to if they need a break? Do you have a positive environment in your classroom for the students? What do you have on the walls of the classroom?
First of all, make sure you are modeling the appropriate behaviors you would like your students to use. Think about yourself as a teacher: Are you able to handle stress and stay calm when your classroom is chaotic? Find ways to demonstrate a calm body yourself when teaching your students.
Provide opportunities during the day to practice self-awareness and coping strategies. We can teach body self-awareness through breathing exercises, movement breaks, and yoga poses. Do you have a minute as a transition between classroom activities? Take a minute to have everyone take a deep breath or to get up and stretch. If you have more time, go through some yoga poses together as a class.
Build up the students’ self-esteem by going around the room and telling students what they are doing well. Provide a wall in the room to allow the students to write uplifting and positive messages to their classmates or place positive and encouraging posters around the room. When your students see value in their work and efforts, they will be much more likely to succeed.
Teach students about feelings and how they may be feeling during a particular activity. The first step to managing emotions is teaching them to recognize their emotions. Ways to work on recognizing their emotions would be through emotion flashcards or social stories. Provide pictures of various feelings and have the students identify them. Allow them to share with you how they are feeling during the school day by having a poster with various feelings on it, and they can place a sticker on how they are feeling at that moment.
Another tip could be using a visual schedule for the kids in the classroom so they can be prepared for what will be going on during the school day, which will make them feel more secure about what will be happening next.
Providing students with a variety of sensory experiences and strategies can also help teach them self-regulation skills during the school day.
Heavy work activities are activities that involve providing input to the child’s joints and muscles. These could be things that provide pressure to their bodies. These can be calming for some students.
Teaching self-regulation skills in the classroom can be vital to help students learn to the best of their abilities! Taking time during the school day to take breaks and to be aware of how you are modeling self-regulation skills to your students can be helpful. Helping students manage their emotions and behaviors will have a lifelong, lasting impact for them to be able to participate in a variety of activities as they get older.
Sara Anderson is a pediatric occupational therapist, as well as a sibling to a teenage brother with autism. Her family has created the blog Learning for a Purpose to help parents and professionals support teens with autism. They share valuable resources they have learned as a family on their journey to help Sara’s brother become an independent adult. They have a Teachers Pay Teachers store with resources for teaching life skills. You can follow their journey on Pinterest and on Facebook.
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