Children who are hard work

[Ripeberry]

Sorry, maybe a bad title but i regularly help at our local pre-school once or twice a week and on a few of those days, one child in particular ends up annoying and upsetting everyone.
He is just over 3yrs old but just won't let anyone just play.
He does understand how to share and we praise him when he does but he just does not like anyone else enjoying themselves.
Today he has hit 4 children, almost pushed one down a small slide backwards, had a screaming fit at another child.
But at least he does not attack adults or shout at them and if you give him attention or distract him it work for a couple of minutes.
He does have a short attention span so he will grab things off other kids and then find something else to do.
I usually tell the kids to not fight with him and just wait until he is bored and most of the time they get the toy back within a minute or two.
Is that the right approach or could i be doing something else?

[nokidshere]

It depends what your behaviour policy is?

If I were looking after him he would have time out each time he hurt another child. I would also spend time on one to one getting him involved in an activity giving him less time to run riot and cause everyone else problems.

If there is no punishment or consequence he has no motivation for changing his behaviour.

[Ripeberry]

We are having a new pre-school leader (hopefully) this Friday as the old one is resigning. The new leader will need to see how she wants to deal with him because at the moment they just seem to distract him or take him away from the situation (which is good).
Our old pre-school leader was supposed to be sorting out the policies since last October and she just told us today that she has only done about two of them :mad:
So it looks like we are going to have to do some new ones pretty quickly and may have to buy the templates from the pre-school learning alliance.
But at least i'm getting experience in dealing with lots of different types of children :)

[sarah707]

I would tend to agree that actions like you describe ought to have consequences.

Short periods of monitored and supported time out to think about what he has done and reflect on how he might do things differently will probably help if they are done every single time (rather than threatened and not carried through.)

What do parents say? Is there a pattern at home?