Children Full of Life, Full of Emotions

In our self-reg course, we were watching and discussing a documentary about a class in Japan, Children Full of Life. In this fourth grade classroom, children are encouraged to share their stories through journalling, and the class becomes a supportive community. This is demonstrated when one child shares a journal entry after returning to school following the death of his grandmother.  This prompts another child to share her feelings about her father's death, three years before. The teacher and the students support both children as they deal with their grief and loss. Eventually the young girl is able to move beyond sharing her grief and begins to share happy memories of her father as well.  The teacher says, "When people really listen, they live in your heart forever."

It made me think back to my own experiences when I was going to school and other classrooms I've observed where, if a child was having a painfully emotional moment, we would excuse them, maybe take them aside or out into the hall to talk with them privately, or send them down to chat with a counsellor.  Once they were settled down, then they would return to class.

What message might that be sending to children?  Are we teaching them that strong emotions don't belong in the classroom? That if you are feeling strong emotions, you should do that in private, not in a public space like a classroom? Perhaps we've been inadvertently teaching children that it's not okay to share your emotions, that the classroom isn't a space for that. But what better space than one where you are surrounded by caring peers and a caring adult?

How do you deal with children's strong emotions in the class?

Description of Children Full of Life from YouTube:
"In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates."