queen bees

there is a girl in the kindergarten class who considers herself the queen bee, who spends her days ordering people around, snapping her fingers in her classmates' faces and referring to other girls in the class as "kittens" who must come when she calls them.  this girl, not surprisingly, makes other girls cry almost every day.  and, try as i might, i can't seem to punish or reason the teenage mean girl out of her.  lately, i've been trying a new approach - namely, that i'm trying to build up the confidence of the "kittens" so that they won't get so upset when queen bee calls them ugly or smelly or pokes them too hard.

today, a little girl, who i adore to pieces, had an altercation with queen bee and began to cry about how she'd just been laughed at.  i spent about ten minutes outside the classroom with her, telling her that although she can't always control what other people say, she can always control how she lets the words affect her, blah blah blah (i meant well, but i'm sure that after the second sentence of my motivational speech, i started to sound exactly like charlie brown's mom).  anyway, the take-away message of my lecture was that this girl should work on being so secure in her knowledge that she is awesome that she won't care about queen bee says about her.

she then left with half the class to do some reading with the third graders, and when she came back, she was beaming.  she came right up to me and said, "miss sarah, i'm feeling much better.  i don't care about myself!"

(i have some more work to do.)