What counts as naughty at school?

[lisbey]

DS2 (6yo) is a nice enough natured boy, but can be mischievous and struggles to pay attention at school.

His teacher stopped me yesterday to say she thought she was going to have to come down hard on him because "although he's never naughty, he doesn't always pay attention"

She then went on to describe examples of behaviour which I would consider naughty and would have hoped had been dealt with at the time TBH

• pocketing school toys
• talking when should be listening
• picking labels of the classroom drawers
• refusing to answer questions

I know what she means, he isn't unkind and he doesn't cause "trouble" or hurt anyone, but surely there should be some gentle and timely discipline for these types of things?

She probably did deal with them at the time, as they happened.

However, if they are persistant behaviour patterns then she may feel she needs to do something about it now, early on in the term, to prevent it continuing.

"Coming down hard on him" couls mean all manner of things, and I doubt it would be anything particularly harsh at this age anyway.

In the Y1 class I work in one of the things we'd do was to move his peg to the cloudy stage.

We have all children's pegs on a big sunshine. They can move down to a sun hiding behind a cloud, and down again to a darker cloud. If they are on this they miss xx minutes of golden time on a Friday afternoon. They can work they way of it, but can obviously go back onto it throughout the week. The teacher monitors it.

We use this in such a situation as you describe.