Teaching Children Coping Skills By: Mrs. Irina Stepanyan

Coping Skills What you do in order to avoid, remove, minimize, or get through a stressful situation. Making adaptation to meet personal needs How you respond to situations. How you manage routines, frustrations, and challenges of daily life to maintain or enhance feelings of well being.

Why is it important? Improves your self-confidence and self-esteem. Improves your independence. Helps you be more assertive. Helps you deal with issues, difficult situations, meltdowns, emotions. Provides you a good life long skills. Improves your behavior. Improves your problem solving.

When can you use the coping skills? When you frequently have melt downs, fall apart, cry, experiences anxiety, have issues with friends. When you seem to have trouble handling argument, failure, disappointment, conflict, decision making, etc. When you have trouble appropriately expressing emotions, like sadness, disappointment, frustration, happiness, excitement….

Positive Coping Skills Recognize your feeling. Learn how to express yourself. Talk to people you feel comfortable with. Write your feelings in your journal Read a book Stop and Think Take a break Find a quiet place or sit alone

Use the Relaxation Technique Visualization Listen to music or nature sounds Take a break Calm self by breathing deeply Count slowly to 10 Tense body and relax Look at books or read Draw or play with clay Exercise, walk or run Listen to music Hug someone, a pet or a stuffed animal

When to use the Relaxation Technique When you get overwhelmed easily When you have anxiety/frustration. When you are groaning, crying, refusing to do work) When you are involved in a mild argument with another student When you have a lot of work to do When you appears, tense, uptight, anxious When you are having a “bad day” When you have become unfocused and off task

Negative Coping Strategies Act violently Yell at someone Overeat Do not eat for long periods Kick something Throw something

Don’t become a human volcano! If you’re about to erupt: Think – what happened? Feel – name the emotion Respond – choose an appropriate reaction

Activity Ask the children to suggest various ways to deal with disappointment. List them on the board. When they've run out of ideas, compare the list with the one at the top of this column (see "How To Deal With Disappointment"). Discuss each idea and ask the kids to give examples. 2. On slips of paper have the class write examples of times when kids their age might feel disappointed. Have them pick one slip at a time from a hat, read it aloud, and offer suggestions for how to deal with it.

Activity 2 What do you do when you experience a strong emotion? Write the list of coping strategies on the board Have students name the strategy that they would be using Positive, negative, neutral, and time-out