There are many reasons why a child may behave so badly at school. Sometimes the child is acting out stress that he is feeling because of events occuring within the classroom (i.e. the teacher yells a lot or he is being bullied) or events happening at home (i.e. his parents are fighting or divorcing or someone is very ill). Other times the child is acting up because of things going on inside of himself - food allergies, genetically based mood issues (i.e. childhood depression or bi-polar disorder), genetically based anger issues (i.e. temperament or a symptom of ADHD or other developmental disorder). It's hard to know how to intervene when you don't really know the cause. A meeting with a professional child psychologist can certainly shed some light on the matter and also give you direction as to how to best help your child feel calmer and behave more appropriately. However, until you arrange such a meeting, you might help your child in the following ways:

• make a behavior chart that the teach can fill in daily showing a happy face for good behavior and a sad face for unacceptable behavior during each hour of school - give him a reward each day according to the number of smilely faces he earns (i.e. if his program lasts 4 hours he can receive a maximum of a 4 smiley reward all the way down to one or zero; each smiley can be worth 10 minutes of computer time, story time, T.V. time or other privilege that he enjoys).
• teach your child how to express anger and frustration in acceptable ways - listen to the download on this site called The Relationship Rule or read that chapter in "Raise Your Kids without Raising Your Voice."
• Make sure that you are calm with him at home and that the atmosphere at home is calm. Listen to and/or read about The Two-Times Rule and the 80-20 Rule.

All the best - Sarah Chana