Red to Ready
By Alison Camire, Head of Grade in Primary School, East Campus
21 January 2026
Kindergarten students learn to notice, name and navigate emotions.
A Kindergarten 2 (K2) student walks into class and pauses. Their shoulders are tight, their thoughts feel fast. A teacher kneels beside them and gently asks, “Where are you today?” The child looks at the Zones of Regulation chart and points to red—overwhelmed, not quite ready. Together, they choose to go to the Sensory Room in their grade pod.
Inside, the world softens. A quiet corner invites stillness, textured panels offer something to touch and explore, and soft cushions provide a place to settle. Here, the child learns to notice how their body feels, name the emotion, and choose what they need to move towards calm, all part of what we call emotional regulation.
Learning to feel our feelings is as essential as learning to read or count. Through our Personal and Social Education (PSE) curriculum, emotional regulation is intentionally introduced from the earliest years.
By helping our youngest learners recognise their emotions and explore strategies that support them, we are nurturing belonging, self-awareness and the foundations for lifelong wellbeing.
What inspired the idea of creating a Sensory Room?
Two years ago, we noticed that there wasn’t a shared physical space in our environment that offered children an opportunity to reset and calm down when they needed it. While each classroom has calm corners, class libraries, or other spaces for students to relax, there wasn’t a space to step away from the group, and change the sensory experiences of being in a busy kindergarten environment. Our K2 Sensory Room is actually a former store room, and it’s been such a transformation. We worked as a team and started from scratch.
Walk us through the space
Our K2 Sensory Room has soft furniture, egg chairs, a light table, sensory materials, liquid tiles, a sound machine, and a light projector. Children enter the room freely during their playtimes, but they are encouraged to keep the space as a ‘Whisper Zone’ and with five children only (as indicated by the signs at the door). The adults also guide children to use the space during their learning day if they need an opportunity to calm down and reset. At the start of the school year, we noticed this was a perfect space for children who were having difficulty transferring from home to school. It became a sort of ‘soft arrival’ for those who needed a gentler entry to the group, with only one or two other friends and adults joining them.
How does this connect to the PSE curriculum in supporting children with emotional regulation or engaging with their senses?
Emotional regulation is intentionally woven into our PSE curriculum from the very first days of Infant School. In K1 and K2, children begin by learning to identify emotions—naming feelings and recognising facial expressions, first in others and then in themselves. As their understanding grows, we build on this by guiding them to notice the physical sensations in their bodies that signal what they are feeling, and to understand that people express emotions in different ways. While the curriculum does not expect children to independently apply self-regulation strategies until Grade 2, the journey toward becoming ‘self-managers’ begins much earlier.
Daily routines help children practise these skills: Morning Meetings, read-alouds, responsive PSE lessons and check-ins using the Zones of Regulation, encourage children to recognise their emotional state and consider what might support them. In some classrooms, this means placing their name in the zone that reflects how they feel when they arrive at school. When a child identifies that they are in the Red Zone—angry, overwhelmed, or out of control—the Sensory Room becomes one of the strategies they may choose to help return to a place of calm and readiness.
The Sensory Room supports this learning by offering both calming and activating sensory input. Soft lighting, soothing sounds and gentle textures help children decompress, reduce worry and feel safe. At the same time, elements such as the light projector’s visual effects, the rainbow banner’s colours, and the movement of pushing and pressing the liquid floor tiles can help “wake up” their senses so they feel more grounded. In this way, the room doesn’t remove children from the learning process—it supports them in emotionally regulating so they can re-engage with confidence.
This article was published for Dunia January 2026.
