ZONES basics!

Last PLC day, our group looked at the Zones of Regulation. We learned about the four zone colors; blue, green, yellow, and red zone. There was discussion about what each zone may look like, what the zones represent, and what zone student should be expected to fall into depending on their current situation.

 The blue zone represents being sad, sick, tired, bored, or slow moving. The red zone represents being mad, terrified, yelling/hitting, elated, and basically out of control. The green zone is the optimal zone for learning, representing feelings of happiness, calmness, feeling okay, focused and ready to learn. The yellow zone will represent an escalation towards being out of control, with feelings such as frustration, worry, wiggling or silliness, excitement, and some loss of control. 

We learned that the zones correlate with our verbiage in regard to expected behaviour and unexpected behaviour. A child who is feeling under the weather would be expected to be in the blue zone, while a child who has much stress and anxiety in their current lives may live mostly in the yellow zone. I found it important to realize that one zone is not to be labelled “good” or “bad” but that depending on life circumstance and situations, you can expect a child to be in a certain zone. 

We briefly discussed how to help students identify with their feelings in regard to the zones, and the benefit of using common language surrounding this learning. 

Written by Amanda Campbell, EA