I have a student who joined us a little while ago. She has a bit of a development delay, but has already made a ton of progress. I teach 3 yo. My biggest hurdle is large group times. She will not sit, she walks around the room doing her own thing. If I bring her to circle, she screams and throws a fit. As soon as I let her go she’s happy as can be doing her own thing around the room. When she’s at circle she’s disruptive to everyone else.

What are your tricks for kids who refuse to join in? And how do you get them to do it appropriately?

I teach preschool special education and participating in large group is a big goal for a lot of my students. I usually start by “timer training”. I bring them over to the group, set a timer, and when timer goes off they get a reinforcer and get to leave the group. Their goal might be to sit for 30 seconds, 1 minuet, 5 minutes, etc.. So it might be that you bring her over to sit right next to you or with an assistant, provide a first then prompt like “first sit, then goldfish” (or whatever she likes), set the timer, timer goes off and you say “good sitting” and hand a goldfish and let her go.

Throughout the year I increase the demand slowly until they are sitting for the entire group time.

[MissMonster]

I've had a few kids like this, I teach at a Montessori school and I just let them do it as long as they don't disrupt. As soon as they disrupt I take away whatever activity they are disrupting us with. They realize they can get their way if they respect that circle time is going on so they have to be quiet.

Once they are more acclimated to school and I've been able to discover their interests (shiney rocks for example) I incorporate it in to circle time. I make a big production of passing around a big crystal or something and say "you're welcome to come sit with us of you want to see the crystal". I let them sit with us for however long I think they can manage before I pass around the interesting object.