Ok - a few more ideas - my experience with younger kids is mostly preschool, but they are close in age, so hopefully there is something that maybe you can use.
I had a similar thought to what Flower said about parent contact - a lot of times I have a really hard time talking to parents when their kids have misbehaved, because for the kids in my school, it is very common for them to be punished by 'getting a whoopin', and I don't want to be a part of that. I have had a parent take their child into the bathroom and spank them there for misbehaving - I went home crying that night.
Our Preschool 1 class (3s) have a gumball jar to reinforce good behavior. It's a picture of a gumball machine drawn on a large piece of poster board covered with contact paper so you can write on it with a wipe off crayon or marker. They get gumballs (drawn on) when they do something good, either individually (I'm adding a gumball because Katie picked up all of her toys without being asked) or as a group (We've done such a good time getting to the carpet for circle time, so I'm going to add a gumball.) When the machine is full, they get a special event, like a pajama day or popsicles at snack time.
We have an interventionist who uses puppets to role play with the students and talk about good behavior. We try to distill the list of expected behavior down to the fewest things possible, so that the students don't have a lot to remember. Ours is something like:
We:
Listen when the teacher is talking.
Use safe hands and feet.
Clean up when we are done.
I think that there is one or two more, but I can't remember them right now.
At the beginning of activities where they have to pay attention - like story time or circle time, I had a whole routine that seemed to work well. First, we'd stand on the carpet and shake our wiggles out. Then we'd sit down. I'd tell them that we had to make sure that everyone has their own space, so it was important that no one was touching anyone else. Then, we'd all 'turn on' our listening ears together, and then take our 'key' out of our pocket and lock our lips so that we were ready to listen. And make sure that we put the 'key' back in our pocket so that we could eat lunch later...hehe.
