Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and kid-grit Align!

Sometimes what your students need most right now is not what is on your carefully crafted content lesson plan. To truly understand a concept, kids (and us, for that matter) need to be prepared with the right tools, social emotional understanding and experiences. Time and again I am reminded that “hungry” kids cannot learn a thing.

As a young student of education, I will never forget the feeling of “A-Ha!” that I had when studying Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; all about how we, as humans, have to meet our basic physical and emotional needs of food, shelter and love before we can ever aspire to learn beyond our current understanding and/or become all we are meant to be in life. This foundational approach made such perfect sense to me.

Now, as a kid-grit ambassador, I am inspired anew by participating in the important work of teaching to the whole student which aligns so closely to Maslow’s framework. Kid-grit’s approach to Social Emotional Learning is a holistic one with the goal of growing more healthy people by building a firm foundation of filling the bucket of understanding first.