08/17/2026
Come chat calm down activities with us today!
August always feels like a little bit of a reset.
We’re finding our school-year rhythm, building routines, establishing expectations, and slowly figuring out what works for this season of our growing family.
While I’ve been thinking about curriculum, books, activities, and everything else I want to teach him this year, I keep coming back to something that feels even more important:
How do we teach our children what to do with their big feelings?
Because learning to read, write, count, or complete a difficult activity is one thing…learning how to pause when you’re frustrated, recognize what you’re feeling, calm your body, and make a better choice afterward?
That’s a skill that follows you everywhere.
Lately, I’ve been reading and thinking more about emotional regulation and the ways our environment, experiences, habits, and expectations can influence how we respond to the world around us.
Two books that have particularly influenced my thinking are Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made.
They’ve given me plenty to think about as a mom—not just about anxiety and emotions in childhood, but about how we can give our kids practical tools for navigating uncomfortable feelings instead of simply telling them to “calm down.”
——
I was a pretty anxious kid.
I had lots of worries that I didn’t always know how to explain or manage, and as I got older, I also went through a period of really difficult migraines.
It took me a long time to recognize my triggers and understand what was happening when symptoms started.
Sometimes I would experience numbness and tingling in my hands and arms. Sometimes I would have blurry vision. Sometimes the headache would become so intense that I needed a dark room and had to lie down immediately.
Sometimes all of it seemed to happen at once!!
One of the things that helped me cope with the panic surrounding those symptoms was something I came across during one of my many panic-and-research rabbit holes:
The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique.
The basic idea is to intentionally focus your attention on your senses:
5 things you can see
4 things you can touch
3 things you can hear
2 things you can smell
1 thing you can taste
For me, it became a way to redirect my attention when I could feel myself becoming overwhelmed. It didn’t magically fix everything, and it wasn’t a substitute for addressing the underlying problem—but it gave me something concrete to do in the moment.
So, I learned how to turn my strategy into a kid-friendly one …
We call it our Calm Down Bin - you can add whatever you have but here’s what we use:
👀 5 Things You Can SEE
•Blow and watch the pinwheel spin.
•Swirl the bead through the maze.
•Pointing out colors or pictures in a book (we love the I-Spy style books!)
•Flip and float the lava lamp
•Pointing out patterns with the visual stimulation cards
✋ 4 Things You Can TOUCH
•Textured sensory shapes
•Stress balls
•Fidget toy
•Different textures: soft, smooth, squishy, rough, stringy, etc.
👂 3 Things You Can HEAR
•Poppers
•Buttons on the fidget toy
•Beads in the maze, pinwheel spinning, tapping or clapping
👃 2 Things You Can SMELL
•Something simple like smelling the air, the smell of our hands, or even the toys in the bin
•I also made a mix and match donuts activity with scented markers - we smell and guess what the scent of each donut is.
👅 1 Thing You Can TASTE
•A simple drink or snack!
➡️ The point is to slow down, shift our attention toward our senses, and give our bodies a chance to settle.
First: What Are You Feeling?
One of the things we use alongside our Calm Down Bin is the “Big Feelings Pineapple” from Learning Resources.
Before we can work through an emotion, he has to start learning how to identify what it is first. Not only to name it, but to be able to ask for what he needs once he knows what it is.
Angry? Sad? Frustrated? Scared? Overwhelmed?
“Please stop.” “I don’t like that.” “I need help.”
We use the pineapple to create a face that matches what we’re feeling.
Then, after we’ve had some time to calm our bodies, we can change the face.
It’s a very simple visual—but for him, having something tangible to point to can make such an abstract concept much easier to understand.
I’m trying to emphasize the progression:
1️⃣“This is what I am feeling.”
2️⃣“This is what my body feels like when I feel this way.”
3️⃣“Now what can I do?” “What do I need?”
Remember: The Calm Down Bin isn’t a time-out.
It’s not something we pull out when he’s “being bad.” It’s not meant to communicate that his big emotions aren’t allowed.
The emotion is allowed. The behavior and expectation of handling it is where we learn.
We can be angry. We can be disappointed. We can be frustrated. We can really, really not want to do something.
I mention to him in practice often “You can be mad, but you can’t be mean.” Sometimes that just becomes background noise as much as saying “no” or “stop” or “calm down”.
If I’m not teaching the what and the how - I cannot expect him to understand what “not being mean” actually looks like.
Sometimes we don’t want to stop playing.
Sometimes a new concept feels confusing.
Sometimes we don’t know what’s coming next and that’s overwhelming.
And sometimes our feelings are simply BIG.
Those moments are opportunities to practice!
—
I like having a physical bin because it gives our strategy a home and it makes it a playful game to practice alongside any other activity throughout the day.
Alongside our 5-4-3-2-1 toys mentioned above….of course, we also have a collection of our favorite books just for this:
📚 Books about emotions
Books that help us name feelings, understand our bodies, and talk about what happens when emotions become overwhelming.
🔎 I-Spy books
These are especially useful because they naturally encourage focused observation—which fits perfectly with the “things you can see” portion of our strategy.
🎨 Color and emotion activities
We’ve also incorporated resources inspired by books like The Color Monster (we have a full felt storyboard activity that coordinates with this book) and other activities that connect colors, feelings, and emotional vocabulary.
🧠 Body and brain books
We love the Power of Yeti, Danny’s Choice, and Dandelion Magic, among many other types of strategy books for navigating different emotions and handling different types of setbacks - being brave, trying something new, failure, etc.
The goal is to slowly build a toolbox that he can reach into as he grows and learns - with the hope that one day he’ll understand and use these strategies without needing the physical items.
I’ve already seen great success in some of the strategies we’ve worked through - lately, when he gets worked up, he knows how to calm himself down with his breathing exercises.
My overall goal is to help him understand:
•You don’t have to be afraid of your feelings.
•You don’t have to make every feeling disappear.
•You can learn how to move through them.
As we head into a new school year, I’m trying to remember that learning how to learn isn’t just about academic achievement.
We’re also learning how to be a successful person - what to do when frustrated or disappointed, ask for help, learn to try again, make a different choice next time and how to calm our bodies when the world feels like a little too much!
•••
Want to Build Your Own Calm Down Bin?
I’ve gathered some of our favorite books, activities, and tools for emotional regulation toys on my website: Beacons.ai/wildandwisereads
The best parenting tools aren’t complicated; they’re sometimes simply a book, a conversation, a handful of tips—with a little practice!!
