Reset and Regulate

As mentioned in the last blog post, I am truly honored to work with such an amazing group of educators!  Over the summer, many of our staff members at Perry Central spent time studying and participating in training focused around Social Emotional Learning.  We are creating a curriculum specific to Perry Central and are organizing it around the topics of Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills and Decision Making. As a team, we have created lessons for our students that encompass all of these skills.  We are really excited about this initiative!

There were lots of takeaways while creating this content and lots of excellent strategies presented that parents can use to help their children.  We have all heard the saying, “They have flipped their lid!” Did you know that this is a real thing based on brain science? We are teaching our kids that we are always in one of three brain states: Survival, Emotional or Executive.  Learning can only take place when we are in our executive state! When kids are upset, anxious, frustrated, hungry or just dysregulated, learning cannot take place because they are either in the survival or emotional state of their brain.  So what can we do as parents and teachers?

Classroom teachers will be sharing lots of techniques and strategies with your child to help them regulate their brain. I am a mother of three and have been encouraging  my own kids to use these strategies. I have truly noticed a positive impact on my relationship with my boys and how they respond to challenges. They are learning to regulate themselves when they are stressed and to be perfectly honest, I am picking up strategies for myself as well.

One of these skills, is often referred to as belly breathing.  To do this, the student should place their hands on their belly and take a deep breath, hold for a couple of seconds, and slowly release the air.  This should be done 3-5 times to move the brain back into its executive state. Tapping with your fingertips on certain points of the body is also a calming strategy.  Some of these tapping points are on top of the head, eyebrows, temples, under the eyes, the chin, under the nose, on the collar bone, or under each arm. One of my favorite techniques is using one hand to apply pressure to the other hand by squeezing parts of the hand and fingertips, then of course switching hands and repeating.  

I can’t speak for everyone, but as I parent, I feel like I need all the help I can get!  A lesson I learned from Trauma Informed consultant, Juli Alvaredo is, “You cannot give, that which you do not have.”  Basically this means, if you are not calm, you cannot give calm. If you are trying to help your child calm or regulated, you have to be calm and regulated.