Nursery advice please!!

[chibi]

I am currently on mat leave, but when I go back to work, dd will be nearly 3. She goes to a childminder and has done since she was a year old. When I go back to work, she will be joined by ds who will be 1 year old, and they will go 3x a week.

There is a v highly regarded nursery at the end of our road and I have been thinking of taking advantage of it for some of the free sessions that 3yo are entitled to. For many reasons these sessions could not take place while I'm at work, they'd have to be on my 2 days off.

I was thinking of sending her for one am session on one of my days off. My question is, is one session too little for her to get any benefit? Do children need to go to more sessions to get anything out of it? I am reluctant to send her on both my days off as this would mean spending less time with her, and she will be away at school all day soon enough!

it might be quite a nice way to ease her into it slowly, as the free sessions only last 2.5 hrs don't they ? I'd go for it. DS1 oes 1 day per week, it took him a long time to settle in, so I'd be jumping at the chance of shorter sessions.

Thanks for replying I think I will give it a go, if it doesn't work I can always pull her out.

I looked into this when I sent DD to preschool last year, and most of the advice I had agreed that at least 2 or 3 sessions a week are best.

Less than this and the child won't bond with the other children, the other children won't bother with them as they aren't there all the time, and your child won't get to know the staff there and vice versa.

Having said that, I do think that parents have to do what works for them, and if that is 1 session a week, then so be it.

What sorts of benefits are you hoping she'll receive?

For reasons of session availability Ds1 (and quite a few children round here) ended up doing 2 sessions a week in one pre-school and 1 session in another. It took ds1 longer to settle and make friends in the pre-school where he went once a week but he did both. Recently we had the opportunity to do 5 sessions at his 'main' pre-school and drop the one day a week and he refused to leave.

I guess the educational opportunities (such as they are at this age) may be less but I'm sure she'll enjoy it.