Dealing with a tiny terror(3.8)...any ideas?

[HGsells]

She behaves (fairly) well at home but nursery recently told me she has started to become naughty at nursery, pushing the other children and taking their toys. I have explained to her that hurting others is not nice and she knows this but still keeps doing this. She herself used to come home telling me a few of the older children used to hit and pinch her.

At the weekend, we were out shopping and she ran up and pushed a complete stranger, I was mortified. Needless to say she got told off and told there would be no storytime at bedtime.

My other DS is now six months old and she has been good with him so not sure if this has anything to do with it?

With her starting school next year is there anything I can do to nip this behaviour in the bud? I really do not want a little terror on my hands!

Any ideas and help really appreciated. Thanks!

My son had a similar phase at a similar age - we talked to the preschool and we agreed how we would work out a time-out strategy so there was consistency between preschool and home - it was agreed that my son understood that his behaviour was unacceptable, and that he was pushing to see how much of it he could get away with - we agreed on a zero tolerance policy towards pushing/hitting/pinching etc with immediate time-out and debriefing afterwards (you know the conversation - "you pinched x, how do you feel when someone pinches you? sad? hurt? we treat other children the way we would like to be treated - pinching is not allowed and if you do it again, you will be taken away from play again, etc, etc).

This seems to be the only thing that worked and we've had 3 months of really good, very sociable behaviour at preschool (fingers crossed it continues).