Kindergartners Lie

I am an Early Childhood Education major and I have my classroom observation in a kindergarten class at Defiance Elementary. Every day that I’m there I work with the children on their sight words, spelling, math, etc. I will even sometimes go out for recess duty with my classroom teacher. I see so many things in that classroom and out at recess that it amazes me. One day while out at recess I had a little girl (we’ll call her girl A) come up to me and tell me that another girl (girl B) had pushed her and said some things that hurt her feelings. So I went with girl A to find the one who pushed her so we could resolve this problem. When we found girl B she was defensive. I had the two girls tell me their sides of the story. Girl B denied everything that girl A told me and girl A denied what girl B had said. So I asked if there was anyone else around that saw what happened. Sure enough there was girl C. Girl C told me her side of the story. Girl C’s story backed up girl A’s story. I then asked girl B if she was lying to me. Her face completely changed and she had a look on her face that you would have thought was caused by her puppy getting hit by a car. Girl B shook her head yes and started to cry. I asked her why she lied and she responded with “I didn’t want to get in trouble. I haven’t had a red day all week and I wanted to stay in green.” (Defiance Elementary has a green, yellow, red color system (like a stoplight) in place that is recorded daily and sent home to the parents/guardians to see how the student behaves in school.) I told girl B that she shouldn’t have lied, she needed to apologize to girl A and that we had to go tell the teacher what happened. I felt like a mean person having to rat out a kindergartner but D.E.S. has a zero tolerance policy so I knew the teacher needed to be involved.