Mazlow's Hierachy of Needs

I feel it is very important for student's to feel equal,

respected, welcome, comfortable. I feel it important for me as a Teacher to have a good relationship with the students and know their interests.

When student's enrol in my service, my process is to show them around the school and we come back and sit on the carpet area and get introduced to our new found friends, and play a name game, where each one says "My name is _____" and so on in a circle.

I allocate an older child or someone they may already know to be their buddy for the first week till they feel confident enough to mingle on their own. I then put them into a small group where we will do an activity to settle them in. Parents and students are given a questionaire to fill in for me to give me a little bit of background information. The child's questionaire is called "ALL ABOUT ME" and it contains things such as What's my favourite food? What's my favourite sport? What am I scared of? How many people are in my family? This information then goes into their portfolios and I can design a program based on their interests. It gives me something to scaffold off.

Regards

Amanda

Figure 1. Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. (From Maslow, A. (1970}. Motivation and personaIity (2nd ed.). New York: Harper & Row; reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers.)