Update:
We started a new preschool in a new town for DS3.5, we are in a real city for a while. It's basically been going great, it is non-academic which is perfect. Kids are 3-5, most of the kids are older than him and somehow it's still okay he's not fully potty trained. There is lots to do and a bunch of the kids are very bright. I think overall it's going to be really good for DS, the play based structure of it is great, his main need is social and he's doing really well at this place in that regard. Someone snatched a toy from him today and he didn't lose it, just calmly followed the kid around reasonably politely asking for it back until a adult noticed and intervened. Yay for little successes.
So far the only thing that isn't working too well is circle time which is at the end. They split the large group into two smaller groups. DS has been started out with the younger half (as he is in that age group), who do short jump up and down type songs and listen to short books. The first day went great, but after that not so much. More and more he is off wandering away, even if I sit with him (parents are encouraged to go). I totally understand his impatience: the fingerplays are meaningless mumbo jumbo and the stories are baby stuff, and repetitive is repetitive rather than comforting. It's also at the end which means it's time to go home or somewhere else.
Today it was so dull we snuck out and joined the older group. Their activity was playing bingo with beginning letter sounds. The bingo idea was interesting to DS as he's played some bingo type games, but the letter sounds is old hat and there was a lot of time between calling each one out as the teacher has to explain to the other kids that no that's a h not a n, etc. It was going to take 15 minutes for anyone to get a bingo (and all these 4 year olds are amazingly sitting there patiently!). Because of the interval DS doesn't notice when the teacher calls a new letter. In the end DS isn't really ready for a sit down game in a group setting. He started well putting a couple tokens down on his card, but then put another kid's token on his card for him (on DSs favorite word rather than a called-out word), he very loudly read the fine print teacher's instructions off her cards while she was speaking, he lay down and swam on the ground after the fff sound word was fish, he took all his tokens and made kind of a cool picture with them, and finally politely said he was done and left. It would be fine if he was not a distraction to the others but his social maturity is 3 all the way and he might well be in the way even if I was there.
There's no real alternative for kids who can't hack the group time as there is no one supervising the other areas, everyone is supposed to go to group time.
Okay so to get to the point, the director (who seems great) noticed that group time isn't the easiest and asked me if I had any ideas for how to accomodate for him (especially if it were in the younger group). I said, "read some really long books". Which wasn't that helpful.
Any ideas? My current idea is just to pick him up a little early and skip group time altogether.
Polly