ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how two schools worked with children to develop a rich vocabulary for describing emotions and strategies to manage ‘huge feelings’. Teachers assessed children’s vocabulary and built in time weekly to explicitly teach feeling words. The use of Zones of Regulation and calm-down corners are discussed, along with adaptations to teaching needed for children with SEND. Introducing one feeling at a time and enabling children to add their own words to the display helped support such children, as did running smaller intervention groups. Children with communication needs not only needed to work out what Zone they were in but also whether what they were feeling was a comfortable or uncomfortable emotion, and this required extra support. Children with autism needed a lot more dialogue and discussion in order to really understand and use the Zones. The chapter sets out the impact of the project, using changes to wellbeing and engagement on the Leuven Scales.
