DS7 did pretty well at a non-academic half-day pre-K program at age 3. Some of that depends upon how well your DD does with same-age kids, I think. My son's interest/obsession was cars and things with wheels. He could read in pre-K, but he wasn't obsessive about it. So he fit in pretty nicely, all-in-all. He enjoyed pre-K and made friends.
We tried a more academic, Montessori pre-K the following year. Some people have had really good luck in this situation, and some have not. I'd say that if you go with something more academic, then you have to be SURE that the teachers understand and embrace where your chiid is and what she can do. This is not always easy to make happen. They're not used to 2 or 3 or even 4yos who read or do math.
In our particular case, we tried and tried to get the attention of the teachers because he was doing nothing in the language arts area whatsoever--they started him WAAAAAAAY too low, and he was bored. I prodded them about it, but I was ignored for half the year. When DH and I saw in their evaluation that he was *behind* in LA, we saw that we had no choice but to become "those parents" at the parent-teacher conference in January, and they finally (grudgingly) realized that we were right. The second half of the year was a tremendous improvement. He was the only kid in the school allowed to read books once and be checked off, since they now knew that if he could read it, he REALLY read it. But it was a hard fight, and I wonder if he wouldn't have been better at the non-academic pre-K and then getting his intellectual stimulation from me.
Teachers who got him would have made all the difference though. That's the most important thing, by far. More than the program type, the focus, whatever. A teacher who gets your child is gold.
