Behaviour Issues in Year R - Daughter - longish!

[WandaBra]

My DD is in year R and I had a terrible day on Friday - at the end of school, DDs teacher asked to speak to me and she told me that DD had been terribly behaved on Thursday and Friday, and on Friday, she had physically hurt another child by poking them in the palm with a pencil.

I didn't know what to say, I know she can be a bit naughty sometimes, but in all her years at nursery (a private one when I worked full-time, and a pre-school when I was pregnant with DS), I never once had anyone say she had hurt another child....I was shocked and didn;t know what to say the her teacher. Now it seems that they have omplemented a sticker chart at school to try and get her to behave and I;m not sure where to go from here, I have been so worried about it all weekend,

DD says that what happened was that the other child took her pencil and wouldn;t give it back, and in the tussle, the other child lost her grip and hurt her hand on the nib of the pencil. She says that the teacher didn't see all of the argument, just the bit where the other child got hurt. She may be many things, but she doesn't lie so I am inclined to believe her. This leaves me in a quandry though as I don't know whether to bring this issue up with her teacher or let it go. It seems a bit much if she is telling the truth though (and hubby and I both believe her).

What can I do? I get the general impression that her teacher doesn't like DD very much, and she often tells me that she's been told off for things that other kids are doing too. I don't want to sound as if she's an angel all the time, but we never had problems with her at nursery and I find it hard to believe that she could have become such a terror in the sapce of half a term at school.

Any advice please?

Don't worry it'll sort itself out. Ds was sent to the headteacher twice in one day during his first few weeks of school. Like your dd he'd never done anything like this before. His teachers clamped down on him and sure enough his behaviour was back to normal. Now they talk at length about how charming he is.

I would let it go. It will soon be water under the bridge.

The truth is that a child's perception of what happened can be substantially different from that of the people around. She may not be be deliberately telling a lie, just have been so wrought up that she saw things the way she felt they ought to have been. (Though personally I would be very reluctant to say of any 4-year-old that they are incapable of telling a lie.).

It is very common for children who have coped well with nursery to start playing up in the more demanding school environment, so again I wouldn't rule it out.

She may feel the teacher is picking on her; that doesn't make it the one and only incontrovertible truth.

I myself have taken warning from the experience of a friend of mine, who stormed into school to tell the teacher off for letting her son (always well behaved, never known to tell a lie etc) get bullied at school. I would have stopped her if I could, as I knew what the real problem was: her ds was finding it difficult to settle in school and taking it out on the other children to the extent that my ds was getting too frightened to want to go to school at all, and he wasn't the only one. The teacher had plenty of eye-witnesses to her boy doing the things she would have sworn he couldn't possible have done. And she, too, started off with 'my son does not tell lies'.

Very embarrassing no doubt, but the upshot was that the teacher and playground staff clamped down on his behaviour and they all ended up really good friends. And the teacher never held it against any of them. That is the good news. Most teachers are hardened people who have honed their ability to move on to a fine art. Just give them a chance to do it.

My ds hit another boy over the head on Friday as he said the other boy wasn't sharing. Different version from the teacher! Told my ds that if he has any issue with other children not sharing then he has to tell the teacher not take action by himself.

I had a problem once with the CM he had who said he had done something heinous (can't remember exactly what but I think it was biting) to another child in her care. He denied it and said that another child had done it. I told the CM who completely ignored what I said (she hadn't seen the whole incident so I think she was jumping to conclusions). Anyway the same thing happened again on a day when she had the other two children but not my ds. This child had major issues with biting but my CM had assumed that girls didn't behave like that so blamed my ds! Only found out from one of the other parents and didn't get an apology from the CM either.