Positive and Constructive Criticism and Sportsmanship

One of our biggest challenges in our school is the demand for perfection. Whether it is part of the Haitian school system's way of teaching, or it is part of the Haitian culture, I'm not sure, but our students become apoplectic if they make the littlest of mistakes. And to make it worse, our teachers, even after 8 long months of trying to model positive reinforcements, still have a tendency to bemoan errors. If a preschool student writes a 5 instead of a 2 the teacher pounces and sternly tells the student they did it wrong. Then the students starts to cry and covers their head and throws themselves on the ground and that's the end of that lesson for this student! 


Another challenge is teaching sportsmanship. Here's an example: 


   Saturday is our PE day. We were doing relay rages using these "wands" that hold plastic balls. A few students hold out hula hoops for the racers to climb thru, tag the PE teacher, and race back to their team. I go thru the whole thing and explain that their are no individual winners, that the whole team must finish, and that even if one person is slow, another person might be fast enough to make up for it. Ready, set, go! I have them lined up littlest to biggest. Our two littlest runners head out. They cheat, as our kids always do, and one of them heads across the team line. At that moment, our other littlest one realizes defeat and throws themselves to the ground. I can't even get her to cross the team line to tag her next team member. The game is over. I repeat the ready, set, go! so our second runners in line can take off and again, the one that didn't make it back first throws himself to the ground and acts to have a seizure, flopping around and screaming. I can't even console him in the slightest!


I am beside myself with ways to help them around these issues. In the short term, we have ceased all competitive games for the little ones and instead are doing activities were they all win! I feel like such a leftie! 


God forbid we ever try to do a "student of the week" idea!


If you have any hints, tips, web links for ideas on how to work around this, please forward them to my email! Thanks!