Anger management for young children

A few years ago I had a four-year-old in my room- let's call him Bailey- who had a pretty woeful family background.  His mum and dad fought violently and constantly, splitting up and reuniting on an almost weekly basis.

Bailey could be the most affectionate and delightful child, but he could also be a holy terror.  His parents had modelled a very clear example of how to deal with problems: shout, scream, and then hit. In his experience, violence was a first-resort coping mechanism which had few down-sides, because after a short while all would be forgiven.

Naturally, this caused a few problems in the preschool domain, because oddly enough the other children didn't react the same way to being hit.  They tended to hit back, complain to the teacher (which resulted in truly annoying time-out, which Bailey didn't really understand- that wasn't what happened at home!!) or cry and hold grudges against him.  Bailey would cheerfully say sorry- he saw that all the time at his house, and it had always worked- but of course he never changed his ways.  Controlling his anger wasn't something that had ever been modelled to him.

By the time I left that job, I had made Bailey aware of the problem in his dispute resolution process and he was, with prompting, able to restrain himself from hitting the other children and deal with his anger in a more socially acceptable way.  Here's the method I used.

Focus at mat time, plus a funny handwashing song

Today I walked into a preschool I'd never been to before.  I asked the staff my usual questions about the kids- how old the children were and what their names were, who had special needs, who would need help to focus at mat time and so on.  I was told that mat time was something of a problem, as several children simply wouldn't sit still and ran around the room, distracting all the others, and that the staff were wondering how best to deal with this.

By the time 'mat time' actually happened a couple of hours later, I'd done some pretty intensive preparation by learning all the children's names and trying to form some basic relationships, particularly with the children who had been identified as needy or 'difficult'- and just as well, because I ended up running that mat time by myself.

How did I form relationships with 18 kids I didn't know in a few hours?