Favouritism/anxiety in Reception

[Hdaw27]

Hi everyone,

My DD has just started in Reception and had a fab start. She was bouncing into school every day, happy, never cried once. She has a fab group of friends and is very bright and keen to learn.
There was an issue with a dodgy new teacher who 'left for personal reasons' after three weeks but she seemed to take this in her stride.

Since October half term she has become anxious about going into school, talking about a behaviour system where kids get put up to the rainbow or down to a raincloud. She has never been moved down but is hyper aware of kids who are, and she reports back constantly who is getting moved up (the same kids all the time!!). Im also aware that she has about a quarter of the house points of one of her best friends even though at parents evening we were told she is doing brilliantly.

Does anyone have any idea on how to deal with a combination of a highly able and sensitive child who is clearly not given much attention by the teachers? We are so worried her confidence is getting knocked by these systems and lack of recognition, hence the sudden dislike of school.

Thank you x

My 4yo noticed she didn’t get moved much on the cloud etc and it was often the ‘naughty’ children who did. They are quite perceptive at that age and they do notice and question why they don’t get praise for being good when some of the more challenging children do. We have a star of the week system on rotation and my child was most put out that one of the very aggressive boys got it before she did.

But… I’ve now noticed mine is getting more ‘privileges’ in year 1. She’s often the one picked to take messages to the office, collect photocopying etc which she loves. She knows she’s trusted to be sensible and these little jobs are doing much more for her than the behaviour charts ever did.

I remember, way back when my now-6th-former was in year 1, he was always on the cloud. Only, we mainly heard about it because another child who we gave lifts to would tell us all about it - it seemed to go over DS's head. There was another boy in their class who'd had an extremely difficult year in reception, and finally in yr 1 was understanding what school was about. Our impression was that the teacher knew what allowances to give that boy, and how to help him, but let my son get labelled as the bad boy. He certainly wasn't going to try to change his behaviour when he saw himself put down almost automatically whatever happened.

Luckily the marvellous yr 2 teacher was aware of what was going on and sorted him out fairly quickly. Also she understood that if he was clowning around he probably just needed to be given a challenging bit of work to keep him occupied ...

He's now a caring, thoughtful, sensitive teenager.

@wtftodo

Sorry to hear she's upset. I personally hate the rainbow/cloud/sun chart, upsets loads of kids for different reasons.

My youngest was telling me recently about the awful boy in her class who is "so naughty" and "always gets moved down, never up!" and I said hmm that sounds tricky. I wonder how it makes him feel? etc and that gave her pause. We had a chat about how for some children, it's harder to follow the rules etc and hard that everyone can see you're moved down (subtly removing the shine from the whole thing for her...)

Which helped with the other thing she complains about - that she doesn't get moved up. I tend to say oh I can see that's annoying for you. I think you do a good job of trying to follow the rules and it's hard if you don't get moved up. Still, do you feel good that you know you tried hard? Great! That's the most important thing, how you feel about yourself, even if the teacher didn't notice... etc...

Absolutely this. I’m a teacher and with my own children I try to undermine the behaviour charts as much as possible!

E.g why are we kind? Does it matter if no one sees? What if someone thinks you did something wrong but you didn’t, does it make it true? How hard do you feel you tried? If you tried hard you should feel really proud of yourself. What your teacher thinks isn’t fact. We also talk about who got moved down and how they must have had a hard day and trying to be kind to them the next day etc.

I have a highly able child who is very good at obeying the rules and a child with SEN who even on their best day will never ‘make the grade’. As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t help children at all and you can see how easily it can lead to mental health difficulties down the line if there are other risk factors.