At four, we chose play based preschool that was full day and attached to the K-12 gifted school. Their version of "play" was slightly academic through experimentation. They used large water tables with pipes and tools to build, had a story-based curriculum every week that revolved around a fairy tale or story they were reading.
The one downside we came up with was that "play based" sometimes means that kids are not allowed to do academic work even if they want to. We looked at a few where there were no books and kids were discouraged from bringing books from home because that was too much "pressure".
For school, we found that emotional health is directly tied to academic challenge. When he's not challenged, he gets in trouble, which leads to low self-esteem, which is a huge whammy on his emotional well-being. We are moving him to a more academically challenging environment hoping that it will fix some of the emotional drama of the poor fit last year.
