ODD Management

Today the Oppositional Defience Disorder was really put into full effect. Since it is the begining of the school year the classroom teacher has to go over the class rules and the playground rules. Since the boy I work with, (I will call him Mahesh, for story sake) needs to challenge and defy everything, he acted out every bad choice that was presented to the first grade. The teacher said on the playground we keep our hands to ourselves, then gave many examples of the wrong ways to interact. As soon, as her speech was over and the kids were told to line up for the playground, Mahesh went over and pushed another kid. Mahesh is very tiny, maybe 45 pounds? So when he pushed the larger boy, that boy just belted him. I figured that was punishment enough for him, so I acted like I didn't see it. I don't know if that was proper behavior management but no one is giving me much support on how to work with him. Later in the day, the teacher assigned a coloring project, she talked about how people are not green so don't use green to color your skin, use tan, brown or peach. As soon as Mahesh got his paper he began coloring the hair green. I used the advice from the pulling in the reins article, and took the green away and left the rest of the crayons to choose from, he then laughed and chose purple, so I then took away all of his crayons except brown and black. Then he chose black to color his hair. I like giving him options and it does work pretty well to give him very limited undesirable choices. Just when it comes to hitting, there are no choices I can give him; You can hit and get punished or you can not hit and have recess time, he would choose punishment because he enjoys being punished. I guess I need to figure out what he likes about punishment.