Do you find yourself at times navigating the emotional journey with students or staff? How can we ground students in the present moment and teach them how to use healthy coping skills when needed? Through digital calming rooms, or reflection rooms, in Wakelet, we can better support not only our students but our staff. If you’re not familiar with Wakelet, take a look at this article to learn about its user-friendly and robust content curation capabilities.
What Is a Digital Calming Room?
Calming rooms are one of my favorite things to create in Wakelet. Curating videos, messages, graphics, and more into one space for students to center and ground themselves can be life-changing for some and even realign the path they are on. When students feel out of control, they can act on emotions in an unhealthy way; but what if we gave them tools to regulate their emotions in a healthy way? This is where calming or reflection rooms become so important to the social-emotional well-being of our students and staff. Think of them as a vision board for emotions! With these digital spaces, students are offered something they have control over and a way to manage their emotions.
In our digital calming room, we have curated resources for the following. But you can choose whichever categories you’d like when creating your room.
- Sound and Music
- Guided Meditation
- Visual Relaxation
- Mindfulness
- Visual Relaxation
- Mindfulness
- Live Animal Cams
- Virtual Tours
- Exercise
- Coloring
- Puzzles and Activities
The Three Rs
Connecting with the students on an emotional level can have way more impact than focusing solely on discipline. We never want a child or an adult to push away the emotion they are feeling. They need to receive it, reflect on what they are feeling, name that emotion, and release it back into the universe. This will allow them to build the coping skills they need when high stress or emotions arise. I love the three Rs, and I believe the calming rooms created in Wakelet help students do just that: Recieve, Reflect, Release!
Personalizing Digital Calming Rooms
In my experience with digital calming rooms, I have discovered that the only way for students or staff to own their journey is if they have complete ownership of their digital calming or reflection room. I can create a calming room all day, but in the end, is it really showing what the individual student needs?
For our students, the “Calming Room” became a “Reflection Room.” Students and staff can create their Wakelet collection and add to it as much as they want. The great thing about Wakelet? It’s a living document and can always be edited and adapted. Using the reflection room, they can take a brain break, go to their collection, and reset.
Here is an example of a digital Calming Room created through Wakelet.
Allowing staff to create a calming room for themselves or for their students to use when a reset needs to take place is a great activity for a staff meeting!
Three Additional Resources
- One of the things my students have fallen in love with is the Canva integration piece in Wakelet. They not only get to design their reflection room, but they also get to put their creativity to work and make the collection their own.
- An app that my students love is called Window Swap. This allows students and staff to open a window into different places around the world. I have watched the stress melt away on students when they use this site.
- Weave Silk is another one my students love to access! It is simple moves with the finger on the mousepad that helps the students be in the present moment.
- Gather more resources from this already curated calming room!
Please see my Wakelet profile for more ideas and inspiration on how to meaningfully reach your students and your community. Not only do we have these rooms to use, but we also have the Wakelet Template Library for school counselors, administrators, educators, and more!
Want to learn more about the three Rs and Wakelet? Don’t miss Dyann at TCEA 2023! She’ll be presenting about how Wakelet transformed her school counseling program. Register now through January 10 for discounted pricing!