In class on thursday we talked about how children have a tendency to act out to get negative attention.  I have a really good example of this.  I was in the preschool lab and we had a little boy who was 3 but almost 4 and his mom was pregnant.  When the baby came about half way through the semester he started to act out a lot.  When ever we had a transition from on activity to another he would run around and say things like, "teacher, teacher look at me."  Basically he wanted us to notice that he wasn't doing what he should be doing.  We picked up on what he was doing pretty quickly and we talked with his parents and they said it was the same way at home.  Both us and his parents decided that he was feeling left out and lonely because the new baby was getting all the attention. So, what we did is we would completely ignore him whenever he was doing something wrong.  We wouldn't give him that attention because it was negative.  But when he did something right we would praise him and give him special attention.  His parents did the same thing and sure enough the bad behavior went away fairly quickly.