Anti-Tattling

Working in an all day preschool with sixteen 3-5 year olds can be tough, especially when it comes to the topic of tattling on friends, in our efforts to fight this behaviour we tried to encourage our children to tell us when they saw their friends doing especially good things. I believe it was a great idea, however, it didn't work as well as we had hoped it would. The children would often say things along the lines of, "Suzie and I played together and she's my best friend" etc., which is great and all, but we were trying to encourage things like, "I saw Jonny share his toy with Luke because he didn't bring one to school today" etc. We even tried giving the children examples and recording the things that we saw through-out the day, but it never really caught on and we moved on to different means of encouraging positive behaviour and not tattling.