Children notice even the smallest change in you. I found that out last week when I went to school after a hair-cut.
Around 3 kids asked me "why are your hair like that teacher?" I said "because I had a hair-cut." The answer didnt convince them. They asked me again after a while and I replied the same thing. Another older child told me I looked nice! I was so happy. Because I knew that children always tell the truth. ;)
It seems children rarely see the big picture. They always notice the finer details. In a garden with a breath-taking view of the sun set, they only notice the beauty of one flower! And we say children cannot focus :D.
On another day a boy bit a girl because he was angry. I told you about one biting incident earlier. This was a similar one with the roles exactly reversed. I am not sure why any child should bite another. Is it an instinct of us human beings? Some kind of way in which we remove our frustrations? Children sometimes are tensed about something and after causing some harm, they tend to relax. They even feel guilty but their tension is gone.
The montessori way to deal with children like this is to physically prevent the child and if unable to do so as they silently do such things, we need to walk up to them, look them in the eye and tell them that we are sad because they hurt a friend. We also need to ask them why they did that. Sometimes it might be that the other child did something to instigate this child and just because this kind of pain was physical, we didnt find out what the other child really did.
All this sounds so easy in words really, but it is tough to do it practically.
