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.

One Step Forward - Two Steps Backward

Picklepot had a much better week last week and I had hoped that we were through the rough patch but then yesterday his teacher mentioned a few issues to Daddy P when he went to do the school run. Apparently Picklepot is taking too long to complete his schoolwork so they are taking away half his break time to finish it off – I have an issue with this purely for the fact that he needs the time at break to run around and let off some excess energy, so if he’s not getting the full amount of time to do that they’re then expecting him to sit down and focus while he’s still too energised and hasn’t had chance to release some of the energy. I’ve already said to the school – many times before – that they can send schoolwork home for him to finish after school, as I feel this would be more beneficial for them as it wouldn’t cause disruption to the rest of their day as he would have had full break time and chance to go wild and then come back into the classroom and refocus.

In addition to this, the class are due to go to a residential home tomorrow to sing Christmas carols for the residents, and Picklepot has been told that he might not be allowed to go if he continues being so slow at getting himself sorted out. Yesterday he was the last one out of the class by a long time, he came out carrying his coat (the others had all put their coats on) and when we got home we discovered he didn’t have any of his books with him that he needed. Again it’s something I’ve spoken to the school about before, it’s all part and parcel of the ADHD diagnosis that he finds planning and organising difficult, and that he gets easily distracted. It isn’t that he’s deliberately taking so long, or that he is so forgetful, but he needs additional support in place. Historically teachers have allowed him to have a checklist on or nearby his desk to ensure he doesn’t forget anything, but the teacher this year seems to think that it’s time he learned to remember things and I’m not convinced she understands that it isn’t something he can learn to do. I know adults with ADHD who rely on check lists to make sure they don’t forget anything! I think she’s expecting too much for a child of 8 with the additional needs he has. I also don’t see the connection between him taking too long to get his stuff together and get out of school at the end of the day and him missing out on going to the residential home – to me, this is not a logical consequence, so how on earth is he meant to understand that connection? If he was late out and it meant that he couldn’t go to the park on the way home because we’d run out of time, or he couldn’t go to an after school club because it was too late, then that would be logical to say it’s because he took too long getting out of school, but I think missing the residential home trip is a tenuous link to say the least.

On Friday, the class had maths homework set, but Picklepot says he wasn’t aware of this homework being set so he didn’t bring his maths book home over the weekend. The teacher says the homework was definitely set and other children in the class are aware of it so she is blaming Picklepot for not listening / daydreaming. I am blaming the fact that yet again it was not noted down in his homework diary – as I have asked them to ensure all homework is, yet they’ve not done it since the start of the September term despite agreeing with me that it was a good idea – and I am blaming the fact that the home-school communication book hasn’t been sent home since the first night it came back, two nights after my meeting with the SENCO and the headmaster about the difficulties Picklepot was having at school. The idea was meant to be that as well as letting me know how his school day had been, they could also note down homework in that, but as we haven’t seen it I’ve no idea what homework has been set. (Again, this is something the teacher says that he needs to ‘learn to remember’ and I’m not sure she understands that it isn’t something he is going to ‘learn’ and that by pushing this point she’s driving his anxiety through the ceiling which then makes everything worse) Yesterday morning Daddy P asked the teacher to make sure that the maths book came home so that Picklepot could do the maths homework – it was left in his drawer at school again, because he felt rushed out of the classroom at the end of the day, and was one of the items that he’d forgotten to bring home with him.

I’ve put everything into a letter and reminded Picklepot about a hundred times this morning to make sure he gave the note to the teacher today so she’s at least read through and knows my thoughts on how we should be working together to support Picklepot, rather than stressing him out and causing his anxiety to escalate, we need to be managing our expectations realistically of what we think he is able to do. Whenever I’m having a conversation with the teacher such as her telling me he isn’t sitting still nicely or he’s becoming distracted easily and I say to her well that’s the ADHD, she’s always coming up with yes but he can do it when he wants to. She’s missing the point completely that he’s not doing it when he wants to, he’s forcing himself not to move and as a result when he is out of school he’s going crazy because it’s like a fizzy drink in a bottle that’s been shaken all day at school and then once he’s out of school the lid is taken off. I asked if he could have something to fiddle with in class to help him focus and she said no because it will distract other children; I asked if he uses his ear defenders to cut out the excess noise in the classroom and she says no because she doesn’t like any children using ear defenders as it makes them more of a target for bullying. I’ve been told she’s such a great teacher and I do like her, but I really don’t think she comprehends SENCO children properly or how she can support them best in her classroom. We have parents evening booked for Thursday after school so I’m hoping to be able to have a proper chat with her then and try to explain my points clearly.

It’s not been a great start to Year 4 for Picklepot to be fair, and with all the Christmas festivities now building up his schedule and routine has been changed and he’s getting overwhelmed with all the pretty things and the lights and everything that’s going on, so it’s looking like we’re going to have a rough few weeks. I just hope we make it through Christmas relatively unscathed and we can start 2019 fresh and with some things in place to help support him more.