DS1 (3yrs 7mths) started in the nursery class attached to his school at the beginning of last month. So far I've been really pleased with how he's settled in, he only really cried on the first day, never says he doesn't want to go, teacher always says he's been fine at the end of the day, etc.
His teacher arranged a brief 'Parent conference' with all the parents over the next week or two, and I went for mine yesterday....
She started off by telling me they were very concerned about his speech.
When he started there, I told her that he was under a speech and language therapist, and that he was on the waiting list for clinic appintments but wasn't likely to get anything until around his 4th birthday due to the extensive waiting list.
A year ago he was only saying about 3 words, and we are so proud of how he has progressed. He's now speaking in long sentences, his vocabulary is really good, and his pronunciation is getting clearer all the time. People can fully understand most of what he says, and all our friends have commented on how much clearer his speech is. We were told by the S & L therapist not to worry about his pronunciation as that is the last thing to come, and he has progressed at such a fast rate in the last 12 months that it will improve in it's own time.
So I was quite...gutted is the only word I can think of...when she said they were very concerned about his speech, they could hardly understand him a lot of the time, and she would be phoning the S & L team to try and hurry his clinic appointments up, as she felt he was very much in need of some help as soon as possible.
She then moved on to a couple of other 'targets', which were general ones such as numbers and colours to work on at home.
Last one was the other one which I'd been completely unprepared for.
They are apparently finding his behaviour in the classroom 'very disruptive', and they think he is "a cheeky little boy".
She went through a number of examples of this:
He goes and knocks over other children's bricks they have been building, if he notices another child is told off for doing something like sweeping some crayons off the table onto the floor, ds will go over and deliberately do the same thing "to get attention". When they ask him why he has done things like that, "he says he doesn't know why." Well of course he can't bloody explain why, for a start he's got communication difficulties and probably can't express what made him do it, and you've already said you hardly understand a word he's saying, so he probably tired of trying to make you understand what he's saying! He once banged his ride-on car into the fence very hard, again deliberately, and another time (this one really riled me) the children were told they must sit with their hands on their knees at the end of snack time, and not to move them, and ds slowly sneaked his hand on to the table and touched his cup with one finger "to deliberately wind us up". He's 3 and a half FFS!
At the end of relating all these incidents to me, she said "I mean, he must be like this at home, it can't just be here!"
My first thought was how dare she make that assumption, but reading past threads, this is apparently where the blame lies in teachers minds if a child has behavioural issues.
DS is occasionally challenging at home, but I would deem myself to be quite a strict parent, and although he tests me, he knows his boundaries and I always follow through with what I tell him is going to happen. (I never smack him, he goes and sits in the hall for 3 minutes if he carried on after I've asked him not to do something). I give him loads of praise when he's doing something well, or trying hard at something, spend plenty of time with him doing activities together, and we have a very close, loving relationship. I explained this to her, and she knows I work in childcare and am studying for a degree, so I am well aware of all the strategies. She just sat there and didn't comment, with a disbelieving expression.
She really came across as having taken a dislike to ds, just the look on her face when she was talking about him throughout. (A few weeks ago I noticed little things about how she spoke to the boys and the girls, and got the impression she is one of those teachers that has a general negative opinion of boys.)She didn't say one single positive thing about him. She didn't ask if there was anything happening in his life at the moment that might make him more disruptive, or how his behaviour was at the nursery he went to before.
Her only suggestion to deal with his behaviour was for me to give him a good telling off at home, about all the things I listed before such as the knocking down of childrens towers etc. I asked ds about it last night (in conversation as I think it's pointless and quite cruel to drag up things young children have done wrong hours later) ,he said "But I do it when they have gone away from the tower mummy so I can have bricks to build."
So did I leap to my child's defence and stand up for him like a mum's job is to do?
Nope, I was bloody useless. I didn't stand up for him properly, or voice my concerns about their lack of insight into DS's behaviour. I didn't say enough at all, probably because I was in a state of shock at the negative things she'd had to say about my little boy when I thought he was doing so well. I ended up in tears of anger in front of her, told her I was upset because it sounded as if she didn't like my child very much, and I hadn't had any idea that this was coming. She said we would have a meeting in a few weeks to see how everything is going.
I could have kicked myself afterwards when all this was buzzing round my head.
Thanks for sticking with it if you got to the end of that! It's made me feel better now it's all written down.