At St Edmund’s we use the Zones of Regulation. The Zones of Regulation is a program designed to help students understand and navigate their emotions, supporting them to develop regulation techniques to help them.
Through the program, students are taught to recognise their emotions and identify tools and strategies to help them to feel calm and ready to learn.
Students are exposed to The Zones of Regulation during homeroom, Pastoral Care, and through explicit language-based concepts when communicating with all teachers and staff. The Zones of Regulation posters can be found in all homerooms and in breathe easy.
We explore the questions:
- What are the Zones?
- How will they help you identify what emotion or state of alertness you are feeling?
- How do different emotions play different roles in each Zone?
- Is the way you act in each Zone appropriate for the setting that you are in?
- Can you identify what makes you change Zones?
We use the Zones framework to support:
- Emotional self-understanding and emotional self-regulation.
- We use the Zones of Regulation to support our students to understand the connection between their sensory systems, their emotions, and their ability to relate to the world around them.
- Sensory integration and regulation, helping students learn to manage sensory input from their environment, and process and respond in appropriate ways.
- Visual scaffolds and visual teachings. Visual structure caters to the learning style of many of our students, by organising materials in a clear and comprehensible manner.
- Social Thinking vocabulary, by providing explicit language-based concepts from which our students can develop a better understanding of social perspective, and interpretation of social emotional responses.
