4 Ways to Help Kids Cope and Regulate their Emotions
Students and teachers alike have a variety of emotions they feel daily. If you aren’t able to regulate these emotions, it can be challenging to get through the day.
Students balance schoolwork, extracurricular activities, and social pressures, among many other things that lead to a variety of feelings and emotions. This can cause them to feel overwhelmed and disconnected from themselves at times if they don’t know how to cope with their emotions.
When students encounter an emotion, they have a choice regarding how they will allow that emotion to impact them. What will they choose? How can we help them with that choice and encourage them to find their center amongst big feelings?
One way to help your students process emotions is through encouraging them to find their center. Centering strategies can empower students to regulate their emotions, which allows them to handle stress, understand their feelings, and make smart choices.
Why regulating student emotions is important.
What does it mean to find your center? Finding your center is about discovering a place within yourself where you feel calm and grounded. A centered student has a sense of inner calm and clarity, enabling them to navigate school and life’s challenges with confidence.
Finding your center is an ongoing journey and may need to happen multiple times a day, week, or month! Providing your students with many opportunities to practice finding their center through a variety of different strategies is a great way to encourage them to manage their emotions and feelings.
Read on for helpful tips and suggested strategies on how to support your students in regulating their emotions with Classroom Champions.
Strategy 1: Decision Trees To Help Kids Think Before Reacting
Classroom Champions teacher Jenna Brown shared one way her Grade 6 students from Beiseker Community School (Canada) work to find their center. After learning about what their center is and ways to find it, they completed their challenge for Canadian Road Racing Para Cyclist and Classroom Champions Athlete Mentor Michael Sametz by creating Decision Trees.
To create the Decision Tree, students identified a big emotion they have been experiencing lately. Then, they mapped out two possible outcomes — one for what might happen if they simply react to the emotion and another for what might happen if they pause and use a strategy to find their center before responding to the emotion.
This strategy helps students think through their feelings and actions they can take to help avoid a negative outcome.
Encourage your students to make a decision tree based on a feeling they often encounter. Once they acknowledge the feeling, have them think through positive strategies they could utilize to process the feeling, and negative strategies they may have used in the past to deal with the same feeling. Then, have a discussion surrounding what they’ve noticed during the creation of the Decision Tree. How can they use this strategy in the future?
Strategy 2: Use Classroom Champions Curriculum
SEL skills, like finding your center, aren’t always intuitive for kids. They often need to see it in action and practice. That’s why in the Classroom Champions Curriculum, athlete mentors bring their mindset, journey, and experience competing in elite sport to teach kids what it truly looks like to set goals, persevere, and work towards their dreams. We empower children to thrive socially, emotionally and academically through the mentorship and mindsets of world-class athletes.
Our Classroom Champions Curriculum covers eight units focused on social-emotional skill practice and development. Each unit is taught through the lens of Athlete Mentor Stories and encompasses video lessons and challenges, classroom activities, and independent practice.
Want to check out the goal setting unit for free? Access it here!
Strategy 3: Download the FREE Emotions Toolkit
Did you know we have around 400 emotions every day? It’s true! When students can effectively manage their emotions, they can center themselves and become more capable of success at both school and home.
Another way to help your students self-regulate and find their center is through this free Emotions Toolkit. This kit provides resources for exercises like mindful breathing, grounding techniques, and frameworks to help students center themselves and win the moment with a simple mindset reframe.
With time and practice, students are better able to react to upsetting situations, reducing the amount of time between strong emotional reactions and their return to center.
STRATEGY 4: Encourage Discussions using these Prompts
What is an emotion? Why is it important to understand emotions? To center yourself, you have to first understand the feelings you are having that may be pulling you away from your center. One way to do this is through having open discussions with your students surrounding emotions and feelings.
Emotions can be big feelings and may feel hard to talk about at times. Therefore, the more we talk about how we feel, the more natural it will become for students to process their emotions and help them find their center.
Looking to spark discussions surrounding emotional intelligence? We’ve created a variety of questions to help you process emotions with your students. Check out this blog post full of questions to help you empower your students to understand, express, and manage their feelings.
Finding your center is an ongoing journey.
Helping students cope and regulate their emotions is an ongoing journey that can take a lot of practice. In a world filled with distractions, demands, and big feelings, teaching your students to find their center is a priceless gift. Through SEL practices like Decision Trees, utilizing the Emotions Toolkit, and prompting your students with emotional intelligence questions to spark discussions, you can empower your students to regulate their emotions and in turn find their center to cultivate inner peace.
