I made a kindergartener cry, now what?
Today, I was in a situation that left me feeling unhappy with myself. One of my students just came back to school after a long week off for Labor and Children's Day. For our first class this morning, we had simple coloring and drawing activities that we needed to do. Every other child in our class was able to draw and color independently, not perfectly or even well, but they can pick up the crayons and pencils and get to work by themselves. Except for the girl that just came back, she started coloring okay by herself, but after the first page she kept giving me the color pencil and trying to get me to do it and I told her (and had my co-teacher tell her) to try to do it by herself, but she wouldn't. This continued for a while until I told her firmly (and loudly, but I did not yell) to do it by herself. At this point, she started breaking into uncontrollable sobs and refused to do anything else - when another Korean co-teacher came in to tell her to work by herself, she stopped to do it while the teacher was in the room, but started crying again as soon as that teacher left. Then, our Korean head teacher came in and immediately started to soothe her.
I felt bad for being so harsh on the girl, and when she sought my comfort, I did hug and comfort her and told her she did a good job for trying eventually, but I am not sure what I should have done. She didn't seem to hold a grudge because later in the day we did another arts and crafts activity and she enjoyed it a lot.
Anyway, the long story leads to some questions. Have you ever pushed a child in a way that you felt was too far? What happened after that?
I know kids cry for various reasons outside of our control, but I am not sure what to do when an elementary school kid has written 3 words (not independently, we work on sentences together on the board) in 20 minutes and then starts crying when I scold them either.