Zones of Regulation

At The Orchard School we recognise and value the importance of promoting positive mental health and emotional well-being.  We aim to create an open culture around the discussion of mental health and wellbeing and to empower our children be able to regulate their emotions. By implementing the Zones of Regulation curriculum we aim to teach our pupils to identify emotions in themselves and others and provide them with bank of strategies to help regulate their emotions and improve their wellbeing.

 The Zones of Regulation is a range of activities to help your child develop skills in the area of self-regulation. Self-regulation can go by many names, such as self-control, self - awareness and impulse control. It is defined as the best state of alertness of both the body and emotions for the specific situation. For example when your child engages in a team game in P.E it is beneficial to have a higher state of alertness, however that same state would not be appropriate when engaging in class based activities.

The Zones of Regulation is a curriculum based around the use of four colours to help children self-identify how they’re feeling and identify it based on a colour and linked developmentally appropriate language. The curriculum also helps children better understand their emotions, sensory needs and thinking patterns. The children learn different strategies to cope and manage their emotions based on which colour zone they’re in at.

In addition the Zones of Regulation supports the children to recognise others’ emotions, begin to understand the impact of their actions on others’, learn to read facial expressions and develop a range of strategies to support their emotional well-being. We support the children to understand that we will experience all zones at different points and there are no good or bad zones- however our success in regulating our emotions depends on us recognising our emotion, understanding it and putting a support strategy in place.

Zones of Regulation Reproducibles

There is progression across the curriculum with children in the Early Years Foundation Stage predominately using the colours and a photograph of themselves to indicate how they are feeling. In Key Stage 1 children are encouraged to use the emotional language linked to each of the 4 zones, using their names to indicate how they are feeling.