Small rooms for 2-3 year olds

[verywiseowl]

DD's nursery is "reorganising" its rooms over Christmas. Currently (for children 2+) they have 2 large rooms - one for 2 year olds and one for 3/4 year olds. They are changing to 3 rooms, so will introduce a third room for older 2 and younger 3 year olds.

DD is nearly 3 and so will move to this new room along with the other older 2 year olds (no children are moving out of the 3+ room).

Nursery are obviously selling the new room as smaller room/more 1:1 attention/potential to do more activities with smaller group, plus better adult-child ratio for younger 3 year olds (they are keeping the 2 year old 1:4 ratio throughout in the room regardless of the children in any given session).

However ... DD is currently in a physically large room with 20-24 children in a session. Her new room is much physically smaller. Ultimately it will have up to 12 children per session, but initially it will only have 5-6 children; it will take about 4 months to ramp up to full capacity (as children feed in at the bottom age range).
I'm a bit worried that she will find it a bit well ... dull ... both in terms of number of chilren to play with and in terms fo space to move about, activities on offer in any session.

Just wondered if anyone else has experienced "small" rooms at nursery for this age range and how their DC get on?

(another worry is that of DD's 5 closest pals, 2 will be in the room above her, 2 in the room below her and 1 is leaving, so that will be an extra change to absorb - though not one I can do anything about!)

The way DS's nursery works is that there is a baby room for 3-18 months, but subdivided into 3m-very mobile and then mobile -18m, a toddler room for 18 months-3 years, again divided into 2, but I'm not sure of the exact point of division. Theres probably about 6-8 in each 'side' and they do some activities together, and then some split.

They only offer one activity at a time apart from toys out for free play, so I don't think that would be affected so much, and I assume they would still be together for outside play so lots of running around then.

At DS's nursery at 3 they move up to pre-school, which has much less room for random running around anyway as they transition them into play and sitting time concepts

I'd like it for my son. hes has had a good ( I think experience in a room of up to 12 2 yr olds , but will not be continuing at that nursery at the point when he would have to go into a big room of 3-4 yr olds. A smaller transition room would be good for him I think. He only needs day care one day a week and I think a preschool type room is too much for him for a long day.

at the nursery I work we have a big room for 3-4 year olds but we split up into smaller groups with our key children and use smaller rooms for much of the day. It has worked really well, I have built up much better relationships with the children I care for and have found the children enjoy it too. Our main room is set up for continious provision, such as sand, water, playdough, small world, construction, painting, junk modelling.The other rooms are a library room with a computer and a role play room, set up as a home corner at present, we also have a rumpus room, for soft play. Dull? I don't think so!