School is all about giving students the skills they need to succeed. That certainly applies to reading, writing, and math, but there’s a growing understanding among elementary teachers that schools should also be teaching a more fundamental skill: helping students self-regulate.

“I found that thinking about behavior objectively—as a skill to be taught rather than simply as good or bad—was immensely helpful in my ability to guide children in learning to control their behavior,” writes special education teacher Nina Parrish.

There are a variety of proactive steps that can help keep students composed. Regularly checking in with kids—and building relationships with them—can increase their sense of safety in the classroom and give them an opportunity to share how they’re feeling, writes educator and principal Jasmine Brann. Plus, sticking to routines and simplifying your classroom expectations can decrease the risk of outbursts born from frustration or confusion, write education researchers Donna Wilson and Marcus Conyers.

But even with these proactive practices in place, young students with still-developing brains can struggle to control their own reactions. Here are some teacher-tested strategies that can help endow elementary students with the essential, lifelong skill of self-regulation.

Teach kids about their brains: To better help students self-regulate, kids need to understand what’s going on inside their heads. Educator Kathryn Fishman-Weaver recommends teaching the basic structure and function of the limbic system—the brain’s emotional control center. She uses a mnemonic device she developed to help kids distinguish different parts of the system: Hippos’ teeth have awful odor (hippocampus, thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, and olfactory bulb). Fishman-Weaver says this crash course helps kids realize not that emotions and thinking are separate processes, but rather that “feelings, thoughts, and behaviors lead to coordinated responses across the brain” that can affect students’ attention span, memory, and executive functioning.

Read the full article about helping students self-regulate by Daniel Leonard at Edutopia.