Zones of Regulation Core Lessons ~ Primary

Transcription

1 Zones of Regulation Core Lessons ~ Primary Lesson 1 Introduce zones as levels of alertness and accompanying feelings, ie: what is your body/brain/heart doing and/or feeling at the time? Materials: Reproducible C: Zones Emotions;; Book (The Way I Feel, by Janan Cain or Happy, by Mies Van Hout); chart paper with stop light sketched on it; (optional follow up activities include Reproducible E: Colour the 4 Zones and/or Reproducible F, Zones Bingo). Lesson Sequence: 1. Introduce the concept and vocabulary of feelings using a book like Happy by Mies Van Hout, or The Way I Feel by Janan Cain. 2. Did you know your feelings are connected to your body and brain? a. For example, when you feel angry, how does your body feel? / can you feel it in your body? Like feeling so mad your face gets hot? b. How about when you feel tired? How does it feel in your body? Energy to run or concentrate? 3. Here at Courtenay El, we use something called the Zones of Regulation (Zones for short) to help people figure out how they might be feeling in their heart or body or what their brain is thinking/doing. a. We have 4 different coloured zones: (compare to stoplight) Show the poster (I would prefer to sketch this out as a stoplight on a piece of chart paper) i. Red is for times when you are out of control and need to stop. You might feel intense anger, very afraid, or so over-the-top happy that you are out of control. ii. Green is like go on a stoplight: you feel rested and calm and yet awake enough to do and learn new things. You might feel happy, calm, good, ready to learn, relaxed. iii. Yellow shows that we might be heading toward a red light and means proceed with caution! When we are in the yellow zone, it is like we are beginning to feel unsettled or starting to get out of control. You might feel like this when you are frustrated, overwhelmed, silly, wiggly, excited, worried or surprised. iv. Blue is not on the stoplight because this is when your body is going so slow you don t even come to a stoplight! You might be feeling sick, tired, bored, or sad. (Draw it in below the green light) 4. Use the pics from Reproducible C to glue on beside each stoplight colour. Do together as a class. 5. Follow up activity: Zones Bingo or Colour the 4 Zones.

2 Zones of Regulation Core Lessons ~ Intermediate Lesson 1 Introduce zones as levels of alertness and accompanying feelings, ie: what is your body/brain/heart doing and/or feeling at the time? Materials: Reproducible C: Zones Emotions; Book, When Sophie Gets Angry, by Molly Bang; chart paper with stop light sketched on it; (optional follow up activities include Reproducible E: Colour the 4 Zones and/or Reproducible F, Zones Bingo). Lesson Sequence: 1. Draw on prior knowledge of students and brainstorm ie: How many of you know about the Zones of Regulation? What can you remember? Why do you think we use it here at school? 2. Here at Courtenay El, we use something called the Zones of Regulation (Zones for short) to help people figure out how they might be feeling in their heart or body or what their brain is thinking/doing. a. We have 4 different coloured zones: (compare to stoplight) Show the poster (I would prefer to sketch this out as a stoplight on a piece of chart paper) i. Red is for times when you are out of control and need to stop. You might feel intense anger, very afraid, or so over-the-top happy that you are out of control. ii. Green is like go on a stoplight: you feel rested and calm and yet awake enough to do and learn new things. You might feel happy, calm, good, ready to learn, relaxed. iii. Yellow shows that we might be heading toward a red light and means proceed with caution! When we are in the yellow zone, it is like we are beginning to feel unsettled or starting to get out of control. You might feel like this when you are frustrated, overwhelmed, silly, wiggly, excited, worried or surprised. iv. Blue is not on the stoplight because this is when your body is going so slow you don t even come to a stoplight! You might be feeling sick, tired, bored, or sad. (Draw it in below the green light) 3. Use the pics from Reproducible C to glue on beside each stoplight colour. Do together as a class or hand out pre-cut pics to students to discuss and then come up and place on the stoplight, time permitting. 4. Read When Sophie Gets Angry to the class. Ask them to see if they can identify the different zones Sophie goes through in the story. Discuss. 5. Follow up activity: Zones Bingo or Colour the 4 Zones.

3 Zones Lesson Two: Your lesson will introduce the idea that some problems are big and some are small (on a 3 point scalesmall medium and big for the two younger classes, 5 point scale for the older classes). We will watch some quick youtube clips to define small med and large problems. Can you please have the link open that I am sending on your smartboards so that I can quickly call up the videos when I am in your classrooms? Each student will get a sticky note, and they can write down or draw a picture of a problem that they sometimes encounter at school (someone pushes on the playground etc). Once they have all come up with something, they will come up and figure out where their problem fits on the continuums. I will have a large poster. We will then discuss how many of the things that upset us are actually small problems that we can consider "glitches". We will discuss what some more reasonable responses to some of the problems that they identified might be. It is important to note that After this, we will have a quick discussion on what happens if we react to a small problem in a big way. This lesson will not necessary address strategies to calm down. We will do that in a future lesson. Zones lesson three- Thinking about Zones through the day and moving through our zones. What do we do when the size of the problem does not match our emotions? Revisit continuum. Read When Sophie Gets Angry Discuss the zones at each stage in the story. Track Sophie s Anger on the Zones Laminated tracking sheet. Second Example: My day on the Behaviour chart. Explain to classes that teachers will be practicing this tracking with their class later on. (Leave Laminated tracking sheet for the class) Discuss size of the problem. Was Sophie s problem a 5? No it was more like a 1 or 2. So why did she explode this way? Why does this sometimes happen to us?

4 Example Can you think of a time when this happened to you? As a class: Draw one example Desk Work : Draw/ Write about a time when you got extremely upset about a small problem. What did you do? (May do as a talking circle with younger grades if we are short on time). Next day, we will take this work, and discuss what we could have done in this moment instead.

5 A time when I reacted in a big way to a small problem: Name: