Calming Down Strategies for Kids

This classroom poster is a great guide to help you discuss with your students some possible calming down strategies they can utilize to help self-regulate their emotions.

Many children find it challenging to regulate strong emotions. Children need to be guided along the path to finding calming strategies that work for them. What works for one child may not be the best strategy for their classmates. That’s why this poster is the perfect visual for your students in a chill-out area or somewhere visible.

The calming down strategies provided on the poster include:

• Think happy thoughts
• Take deep breaths
• Listen to some music
• Mindfulness coloring
• Drink some water
• Nature walks
• Read a book
• Talk to a friend
• Build a puzzle
• Use positive self-talk

How to Talk About Calming Down Strategies with Kids

It’s crucial that you spend some time exploring different emotions with your students to help them understand and become more self-aware.

You may like to introduce one calming down strategy a day, allowing children to act it out and talk about how they feel afterwards. This process will help reveal which strategies work best for which students.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of calming down strategies, but it is certainly a good starting point. You may like to ask your students what other activities they would add and create an anchor chart of the additional strategies they suggest

Easily Download This Calming Strategies Poster

This poster can be downloaded as a full-color or black-and-white PDF. Use the dropdown menu next to the Download button to choose your preferred file.

Both letter-size and tabloid-size files are available.