Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge discusses the importance of brain science when it comes to education initiatives, specifically on knowing how the mind of a child works in different environments.

• To adapt younger children from home to school settings, teachers might see results in letting kids talk out loud to develop their working memory. How can nonprofit programs align with holistic learning in this context?

• Here are nine more lessons on brain science for educators.

Children often live in two different worlds. That was the premise of a video Akimi Gibson, the vice president and education publisher of Sesame Workshop (the nonprofit behind Sesame Street), showed the audience at the EdSurge Fusion conference in Burlingame, Calif.

In the video, singer Ed Sheeran, flanked by Sesame Street characters, sings about the contrast between life at home and life at school for a kid. At home, a child can move around more and talk when she wants. School is a more controlled environment where she has an assigned seat and has to raise her hand.

“For our young ones, going from ‘me’ to ‘we’ can be quite traumatic,” Gibson said. Educators have to think about how children's’ brains work, she argued, and schools need to focus on educating the “whole child,” a term that takes non-academic factors into account, such as health and emotional supports both in school and at home.

Sesame’s whole-child approach, for example, integrates social and emotional development, physical development and health and academics. But for a child to thrive in those three areas, she needs to know how to self-regulate her emotions, behavior and attention. She also needs to master the cognitive processes behind behaviors, such as working memory, Gibson explained.

Read the full article about educating the whole child by Tina Nazerian at EdSurge.