PUnishment?

[PrettyCandles]

Had a conference yesterday with ds1's teacher. He's been behaving in an unacceptable way at school (agressive) and we need to sort it out. To my surprise the teacher was completely gentle with him, no mention whatsoever was made of punishment in any form.

Is punishment not used in school? I expected there would be something along th e lines of 'If this continues/happens again, then the consequence will be keeping you in at playtime/loss of priviledges etc'. As well as the extremely supportive 'what can we do to help you behave differently'.

Does anyone know anything about discipline and punishment in primary school?

I don't know. I am sure that some of DS2s classmates have been punished for things by keeping them in a break time.

Maybe she thinks that other methods would be more productive?

Lots of schools seem to use a ladder system -- ie. they have some kind of large visual indicator with an up and a downside, and move individual children's name labels up or down according to behaviour.

Ds's last class (Y3) had a rainbow with a pot of gold at one end and a puddle at the other. The aim was for each table to get as many names into the pot of gold as possible by the end of the day. The highest scoring table won first choice of activities during 'golden time' on Friday afternoon. I think there were individual sanctions for moving too far in the opposite direction, possibly including loss of playtime or loss of 'golden time'. IIRC there were also Friday rewards involving eg. pencils or little notebooks or stickers for individual acts of good behaviour.

I don't think any of the parents ever quite understood the system, but needless to say all the children were completely clear about what was what. That system (with variations) was operating in all the year groups at that school, and generally worked well.

They have something like that for the whole class, but this is about an individual. I don't know whether ds's actions have affected the class reward system.

It's very difficult to discuss this with ds.

At our school you get yellow cards. They can be dished out without warning if the misdemeanor is bad enough, but usually follow a warning. The cards are printed with space for the teacher to write what they have done. There are three tick boxes and they have to get 3 "good behaviour" ticks from teachers before they are allowed to go outside at break again. There is a special bench outside the Head's office where they have to sit at break time til they've got their three "commendations"