What is Just Right?
We use the Just Right Programme across the whole of Hill Park School to help all pupils recognise and regulate their feelings and behaviours. We hope the information and resources here will enable you to use the same language and visuals at home.
You can see the Brighton and Hove Inclusion Support Service's (BHISS) introduction to the programme here:
Why do we use it?
Some children may struggle to regulate their behaviour, attention and alertness due to difficulty processing sensory information.
We use sensory experiences to understand the world and our place in it, to develop our motor coordination skills and cognition and to regulate how alert we are.
Sensory information comes through touch, taste, smell, sight and sound. We also sense movement (vestibular sense), and where our body is in space (proprioceptive sense).
See the pyramid below for how these skills develop, from the bottom up.
The ability to combine and organise all this incoming information and respond effectively is called sensory integration.
Children who have difficulty organising and processing this information may have a sensory processing disorder.
As a result, they may experience the world as either sensory overload or lacking some sensory input.
Sensory processing disorders can make it challenging for children to regulate how alert they are and to adjust to the demands of their environment. Just Right replaces the need to use a lot of complex words at a time that may already be overwhelming for a child.
What does it look like?
Below is the Just Right chart that we use in school, it can help children identify how they are feeling without the need for lots of language.
Children's level of alertness can vary from low to very high. The Just Right colour chart gives an overview of what these states can look like.
Our level of alertness naturally changes throughout the day, so do children flow between the different states identified.
The colour chart can be used to identify when children are moving out of the Just Right (green) zone.
A suggested strategy can then be chosen to bring them back to Just Right.
Regular sensory activity breaks all through the day can help children with sensory processing difficulty, to stay in the green zone (or closer to it!).
See the Activity Symbols and Sensory Breaks pages for activity suggestions for each zone.
