Every morning or 2/3 days

[Pebbleinthesand]

DD is 2.5 and will get funding for preschool next September. Being a June baby she will only get one full year before starting school.

She started preschool in September doing 2 full days. I'm looking for opinions on what other parents think is the best option for next year (obviously I know it depends on the child to a certain degree) :

Option 1: continue with 2 full days next year until she starts full time education in recpetion

Option 2: add an extra day on to give her more time in preschool, more time to access Phonics and other learning that will help her in reception.

Option 3: change to 5 mornings to get her into the routine of getting up and going somewhere every day.

Until she started preschool I'd said option 3 would be what I'd do but I'm not sure if going from full days to half would be a backwards step for her now.

Any similar experiences shared would be brilliant.

We did 2 full days Mon and Fri. And half day Wed for 2 years.
Tues and Thurs we did stuff together!! Def worked well ime.

I did 2.5 days with dc 3 (although she’d been attending 3 pm sessions a week from 2.5 so was familiar with it anyway) & 4. Weds pm then all day Thursday & Friday. It worked well for them & they settled in to the routine quickly. I intend to do the same with dc5 (a late July baby) from September. That being said dc1 started nursery the September after dc3 was born so she was used to the routine of it from very early on.

My dd does 5 mornings a weel at nursery and prefers this to when we tried her with a few full days.

Same routine every morning, just different place each afternoon depending who is looking after her

I chose to do 3 full days for mine. I'm on maternity leave currently so thought it would be nice to have a couple of full days off in case we want to do day trips etc. Also if he gets tired after his days there he can easily have a lazy day at home.
When I go back to work 3 full days worked best for us for childcare too so wanted to get him settled in that routine early.

Honestly I would just do what works best for you. I wouldn't worry about phonics and stuff personally as there's plenty of time for that once they start school, and she'll be obviously exposed to a lot at Nursery anyway.

I like my toddler doing a few full days and then a couple of clear days off so we can go on day trips, and be flexible about timings when we go out places. If I wasn't working then I would definitely also appreciate having whole days to get stuff done whilst he's at Nursery rather than half days!

DD1 did 2.5 days. DD2 did 5 mornings, then I added two days of wrap around.

The 3hr session went in a flash. I barely had time to do the food shopping and do a quick tidy. Then by the time I got her home, lunch, and played for half an hour we had to get back to the school to pick her sister up.

The 2.5 day pattern gave us time to do other stuff like music group and days out.