Parents Evening

Parents evening for Picklepot was actually a pleasant surprise. We were told that he is a very intelligent, very capable, very witty and very well mannered boy who is a credit to us and how hard we work with him. The teacher said he is a joy to have in the classroom – most of the time – and when they went to the residential home to sing Christmas carols on Wednesday (yes, he went in the end) the residents said he was very well mannered and polite and a very charming boy. He made friends with one of the residents and had a good old talk with him, and when I picked him up from school on Wednesday he was telling me all about this gentleman, and how he’d celebrated Christmas as a child.

With his maths work, Picklepot is very clever, but she needs  him to get his times tables learned well as he needs them as the ‘backbone’ for the upcoming work. He is superb with maths, but he doesn’t know his times tables well enough and this will hold him back from further advancing as Year 4 continues. His English written work is very good and he has a great grasp of language and words and their understanding, his reading is fantastic, but he needs to learn to put things in writing for the work to be completed – his impatience to get the writing part done as quickly as possible results in him making mistakes that he could avoid if he took some time over the writing, and he often tries to use clever words or language without doing so properly – he needs to learn to walk before he can run, in her words! His grammar is not so great, but he’s working on it, and it was the one thing that on his part of the feedback paperwork he’d listed grammar as something he finds difficult, so in the New Year I’m going to find him a work book that he can do additionally at home to help him with that. She said his artwork is brilliant, he loves drawing and has a real flair for it, and the feedback from the after school coding club was that other than the one incident I knew about when he lost his temper, he has worked very hard and picked up the work very quickly. The teacher who runs it feels he has a flair for it and if he decided to continue with coding he would go far.

All in all it was really nice to have a chance for a proper chat with Picklepot’s teacher – as she said, when we catch up at the end of the school day and she has things to tell me she kind of ends up offloading all this negativity onto me of what has gone wrong in a day but often there has been great moments too and she doesn’t get time to convey them or the bad moments have overshadowed them, so to be able to speak with her was good. We discussed the communication book and she said she’s going to make sure that comes home regularly for me – the period it was not coming home, she was not in the classroom at the end of the day so she hadn’t been able to ensure it came home – we discussed the fact that the connection between him being slow and missing out on the residential home trip wasn’t clear for him as there was no logical connection and she said OK that’s a good point I understand what you mean.

I did raise with her the fact that break time and lunch time has been taken away in order for him to finish his classwork. I said to her that I totally understood he needed to do the work, that was not my issue, but I was concerned that if he didn’t get time out of the classroom to run around and let off steam then it would make things more difficult in the next lesson to get him focused on task and not be extra fidgety. She said just to make it clear, he’s not missing whole break times or lunch times. If he’s not been concentrating in class and hasn’t done enough work I give him a choice – he either does it in classroom time like everyone else, or he’ll be staying in at break or lunch until it is done, the choice is his. She said she doesn’t enter a discussion about it, just gives him that information and walks away. A few weeks ago this would have had him throwing a fit and chucking things about yelling but now she said she hears him huff and sigh for a moment then when she looks back at him he is getting on with it. At the end of the lesson when everyone else goes out for break or lunch, he stays in to finish the task and she said normally it’s very quickly done by then because he’s keen to finish it and get out so he only tends to miss a couple of minutes.

I said to her I didn’t want her to feel that I was bombarding her with notes / messages but that I felt clear communication between the school and the parent was important and she agrees with me and encouraged me to continue as I have been which is reassuring. She said sometimes Picklepot does come out with things such as “my mum says I don’t have to do that” and I said if he does, just call me and ask me, I have no problem with you phoning me, or emailing me, or texting me, and asking me, because I know that it’s a bad game of Chinese whispers between the teacher, and Picklepot, and me, and I don’t want anyone getting annoyed or upset because they’ve taken what he’s telling them as gospel truth and not finding out how the conversation actually went. There’s never been a point I’ve said to him he doesn’t have to do anything to do with school so I don’t know where he’s got that from but it’s something he seems to like repeating about PE, work he finds boring or too hard etc.

All in all I was happy with the meeting and feel like we’re on the same page at last. I asked her about the organisational side of things and said it was something he really struggled with, so we’re going to try implementing some new ways of reminding him into the classroom and into home life to support him further.