School minimising DS behaviour at school

[Babieseverywhere]

Just picked up DS from school who was in the middle of a meltdown in the middle of the playground. His teacher (who is lovely) was remarking his behavioural chart and gave him a neutral straight smile face for last session of the day because of rudeness.

So schools code would appear to be any behaviour just short of a meltdown is a green smiley face, meltdown is a neutral straight face, does beg the question how out of control the child would have to be, to get a red angry face ?

This means DS is having a couple of meltdowns a day aka straight smiley face and goodness knows what behaviour under the smiley one.

It depends on who is the chart for? If your DS (or anyone else in class!) can see it then it's unhealthy for him to get red or neutral faces day after day. He should be getting mostly smiley faces no matter what, the smileys should be relative to his usual behaviour. Possibly this is not a good feedback method for him; my DS used to get reward stickers on a chart for good behaviour but bad stuff was never highlighted. It would be dealt with on the spot and then that was that; I might get feedback from the teacher about it, but since he wasn't in full control of himself there was no benefit in discouraging him by showing him he wasn't succeeding at "being good".

These are charts NOT for the children but for the teachers to reflect behaviour issues in their classroom...apparently they do they as standard for all 30 kids daily.

Teacher agreed to show me DS charts weeklyas long as I didn't show DS it iyswim, to reassureme that he is fine in school.

Come to think of it, that chart could be one of the potential reasons why your DS dreads school? The school may still think he's unaware and he really needs to have his behaviour pointed out, but it may be more that he can't control himself so even a neutral non-smiley face might feel like having his face rubbed in it. It's too soon to pursue with the school though, better to see if you can get professional back-up first.

Oops sorry - cross post!