It is a bit painful to watch your child leave his place reading "Modern Chess Openings" at home to go match the letter "b" to a picture of a baseball bat all day. While he didn't appreciate the ridiculous nature of that exchange, it drove me nuts!
Yeah, what she said!
A half-day K with a teacher excited to differentiate work for DS worked great for us. He mostly got time with other kids, but he still had the energy and time to do his own thing when he got home. A full day of undifferentiated work in 1st grade was a disaster, and we pulled DS6 out for home schooling. That has been a great success!
My thing is that so much depends on 1) the teacher and, 2) how much time the child will have to do his/her own thing after school. A non-academic, half-day preschool with a fired-up teacher is going to be better than an academically focused, inappropriately low-level, full-day K class with a rigid "This is what we do here" teacher. (Well, in your case, provided the preschool doesn't do a lot of singing...) But most preschools allow a lot of "free time" for playing with blocks and riding tricycles and drawing. These things are good for pretty much all kids at that age. The HG+ ones just do their chemistry and novel-writing when they get home. And if tricycles and blocks aren't your son's thing, you could probably find a preschool program that would let you bring in projects that *were* his thing. In my experience, preschools tend to be more flexible about such things than public schools.
One other thought: preschools do tend to be more likely to "expel" kids who can't behave as the school wishes them to. It happens with surprising regularity. I have one friend whose HG+ son was asked to leave three different preschool programs! And the kid is NOT a holy terror or anything! Be prepared to work closely with the teachers on behavioral issues if there are problems. I'd plan to be in the class A LOT to help out. you're not going to get to be one of those parents who drops her kid off and has the day to herself...(Not that you planned to be...)
