These are my personal thoughts on what is going on in my classroom, a reflection, a blog post if you will.
The difficult reality I speak of today is hungry children. It is difficult because children whose basic needs are not meet can not move on to anything else until those basic needs are met. I'm talking about learning here. If a child is hungry or tired, they are not going to be learning anything to their fullest potential. My job is then considered difficult because I want children to learn and be successful reaching their fullest potential but it isn't happening because they are hungry.
The last week in January I had at least half of my students tell me they were hungry. I would ask them if they had breakfast or something to eat before coming to school. Guess the response. No. I pondered this for a while. It would not have caught my attention but this trend was occurring in both morning and afternoon classes and with multiple children. This causes a teacher to wonder what is going on here. Why are the children so hungry?
My thoughts: were they in a hurry this morning, did they not want to eat, did they over sleep? What is it? I had to think about this because these basic needs were interfering with our learning. My second thought was, it is the end of the month. We all know our finances can get tight during this time of the month. I can't say for sure what is going on or why the students have been coming to school so hungry, but it does make me stop and think.
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