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Creating a Calm Box and other resources to support emotional regulation

Simple and effective tools designed to help children manage big feelings.

Introduction

A calm box is a simple yet effective tool designed to help children manage big feelings like anger, anxiety, or overwhelm. It’s a container filled with comforting or distracting items, such as sensory toys, fidget tools, soothing scents, colouring materials, or a favourite book.

 

The idea is to give a child a way to self-soothe and regain control when emotions feel too big to handle. By encouraging children to use a calm box during moments of distress, we help them develop healthy coping strategies and emotional regulation skills in a safe, supportive way.

Parent/carers often ask:
  • What things can I do to help my child regulate their feelings?
  • How can a Calm Box help my child?
  • What do I need to make a calm box?

Top tips and ideas

What does a Calm Box contain?

These boxes typically contain a variety of items that can be used to soothe and distract. The items you put in will depend on the age of your child and what items are safe for them, and the things that are most likely to be effective for helping them.

The sort of things you might include are:

  • Sensory toys (fidget toys, stress balls, textured objects) 
  • Mindful colouring books and crayons
  • Paper and art/craft materials
  • Calming music or nature sounds and headphones
  • Shells, stones, feathers, pinecones
  • Different textures, fabrics and materials
  • Things to smell
  • Rubik’s cube
  • Weighted balls
  • Hand cream
  • Bubble wrap
  • Slime
  • Glitter tube
  • Water and oil tube
  • Rain stick
  • Playdough – which could be scented
  • Lego or Duplo bricks
  • Stickers
  • Windmill
  • Small soft cuddly toys
  • Bubbles
  • Sstories/pictures about feelings

Health and Safety

  • Avoid small or loose items (e.g. beads, buttons, dried pasta, small pompoms) that pose a choking risk. 
  • Ensure materials are age-appropriate and check for allergies or skin sensitivities with things like slime. 

Introduce the box to your child and encourage them to use it:

Keep the box in a handy place, so it is easy to for your child to get to when they need it.

Make sure they know where it is and that they can always get easy access to it themselves without help.

Show your child how to use each thing and explain how and why. Encourage them to practise exploring the items in their soothing box when they’re feeling calm. Explain that if they feel angry or upset, the box will help them feel better and calm again. The more they practise, the more likely they are to use it when they need it.

Prompt them to explore their box when they feel angry or upset. You can also bring their calm box to them encouraging them to explore the items within it, if they are not able to get it for themselves at that point due to the level of their emotions.

Breathing 123

Another way to calm your child is through ‘Breathing 123’:

This breathing exercise helps children to regulate their emotions – you could practice it together:

Your child can repeat this lots of times until they feel calmer. You can also do it with them.

You could also put a visual prompt/photo of breathing tin the calm box to remind your child to breathe.

Glitter Bottles NEED TO FINISH FROM HERE!

Chaos and Calm Messy Play Ideas

These videos have been produced by Chaos & Calm and show how to set up sensory and messy play ideas for young children with SEND Videos, individual play recipes and sensory play ideas are also on their website.

You can find more resources on the Chaos and Calm website.

Visit Website
Other useful videos and web links for messy play and sensory play

Pinterest is full of different sensory play ideas too.

Jargon Buster

Here are some terms or abbreviations you might come across:

Sensory Play

Any activity that stimulates one or more of a child’s senses – smell, taste, touch, hearing, or sight and that help a child make sense of the world around them. Children use their senses (touch, taste, smell, sight, sound) to interact with different materials without specific rules or instructions.

Messy Play

The open-ended exploration of materials and their properties. Activities like squishing clay, pouring sand and water, using cornflour allow children to repeat and experiment as they like.

“Taste Safe”

We use this phrase when we talk about making sensory play elements where the ingredients used are edible / safe for children to put in their mouths (but we would still not recommend letting them eat huge quantities of it!).

Motor Skills

These are skills that involve physical movements.

  • Gross Motor Skills – bigger movements such as kicking, throwing, jumping
  • Fine Motor Skills – smaller movements such as writing, stirring, threading

Turf Tray

A large flat tray with raised edges that can be filled with various materials for children to explore easily, particularly on the floor.

Sensory Overload/Overwhelm

Sensory overload occurs when the brain receives more input from the senses—such as light, sound, touch, taste, or smell—than it can effectively process. When overwhelmed, the brain may react as if facing a threat, triggering a fight, flight, or freeze response. In children, this can lead to meltdowns or distress that may be misinterpreted as ‘bad behaviour’, rather than a sign of sensory overwhelm.

Sensory Processing Disorder

A neurological condition in children that can affect the way the brain processes information coming in from the senses. They may be extra sensitive to sensory input (hypersensitivity) or not react to it at all(hyposensitivity).

ASD/C

Autistic Spectrum Disorder / Condition.

Neurodiversity

A framework for understanding how people think, learn, and behave. Most people are neurotypical, meaning their brains function as expected by society. However, it’s estimated that around 1 in 7 people are neurodivergent. Neurodiversity covers a wide range of conditions, including dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, and autism.

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