Anonymous wrote:We soft skipped my Feb birthday son in K. I say soft skipped because the location where we are (international) has a Pre-First level where the typical US kindergarten ELA curriculum is over 2 years in Kindergarten and Pre-first but math is Kindergarten level in K and 1st grade in Pre-first. My son was reading 2nd grade level and doing math at the 1st grade level going into the year so it's a better fit. He just missed the cutoff (Dec 31) so we felt comfortable with the social aspect and he's done fine, but he's a pretty outgoing/not shy kid. When we move though, I would not be comfortable with the older cohort of kids found in a school with the typical Sept 1 cutoff (plus summer redshirters) so we plan to have him "repeat" and hopefully there'll be some sort of acceleration available then.

correction, sorry

We soft skipped my Feb birthday son in K. I say soft skipped because the location where we are (international) has a Pre-First level where the typical US kindergarten ELA curriculum is over 2 years in Kindergarten and Pre-first but math is Kindergarten level in K and 1st grade in 1st grade. My son was reading 2nd grade level and doing math at the 1st grade level going into the year so it's a better fit. He just missed the cutoff (Dec 31) so we felt comfortable with the social aspect and he's done fine, but he's a pretty outgoing/not shy kid. When we move though, I would not be comfortable with the older cohort of kids found in a school with the typical Sept 1 cutoff (plus summer redshirters) so we plan to have him "repeat" and hopefully there'll be some sort of acceleration available then.

Our advanced summer born kid was in a private school that held her back in all subjects. So we decided to move her to a gifted magnet. She stayed with age group for all subjects except for math where they skipped her from private school sixth grade math to Algebra II.

This question came up with our two oldest kids whose birthdays were 2.5 months and 4 months after the cutoff for the next grade up. We let the one with a birthday 2.5 months after cutoff go ahead after the school reached out to us and said it was the unanimous consensus of her teachers. We kept back the one with birthday 4 months after cutoff in the correct grade.

Decision was not just based on the 1.5 month difference in relative age, but also on their personalities and maturity and input from the teachers. And a little bit maybe on the size and composition of the specific grades at their small private school.

Because they attend a Montessori with mixed age classrooms, age differences are not as big a deal socially.

I had this kid. He is now in college. And no, I didn’t skip. And am grateful. He went through FCPS AAP and TJ, and was plenty challenged— especially by HS. But even before then, he had social skills to work on and in MS executive functioning became a huge issue. From an EF, adulting and generally making good decision, he’s done very well in college, but he just wasn’t ready a year earlier.

Remember boys are behind girls anyway in EF, and the difference between anA and a C in some MS and HS classes is reading directions, using class time and turning in the work.

With a library card and JHU CTY and AOPS and a Russian math and a chess class or musical instrument or nature camp, you can supplement the academics at home. If your kid doesn’t have the EF and social skills to start MS and HS, that’s much, much harder to deal with then supplementing.

Also, if. You are in the DMV, realize it’s not uncommon for a UMC kid to be a couple grades above in academic content.

Each kid is different. I let all 3 of my kids skip a grade and here is my lesson:

1) My eldest skipped her last year of high school. This was fine because she was with her friends but was taking classes a year ahead of them the entire time (we knew by 9th grade that she was going to need to finish high school early). This avoided the "friend issue". She was about 2 years academically ahead of her friends for years and was bored for years. But we only skipped her by this 1 year because she was a bit immature and we wanted her to be more impressive to colleges. The issue with this situation is that she missed senior prom and all other senior activities. She was invited to graduation but wasn't a part of anything else. It was fine for this child but I would not recommend it.

2) My second child skipped 8th grade. I also do not recommend this to anyone unless you were in our situation which is that she had BAD friends (drugs, etc) and we needed her to be put in a different school with different friends and we couldn't afford private. She was also academically advanced enough to skip a grade but not enough where I would have done it in a different situation. The advantage is that she then had a normal high school experience.

3) My third child "skipped" 5th grade. She was not academically advanced at all (if anything, she was behind), but she had just missed the cut-off for kindergarten so was a full year older than everyone in the grade, was physically and socially so mature that all of her friends were always a year older (and her softball team was by age and not grade which did not help). We knew when we allowed her to skip that it was not going to be good academically for her but even the principal of the middle school agreed that it was better for her to be an average student that was fitting in than an advanced student with no friends. For us, this child is by far doing the best in a year advanced. In fact, her grades went from Bs to As when we were expecting them to go from Bs to Cs, so that was the biggest shock is that when a kid is happy socially, they do so much better academically too.

No, don’t skip a grade. We didn’t for our daughter upon realizing that although she’s academically gifted, it didn’t warrant taking her away from the peers of her age. She’s still a kid and going through the same psychological, physical and emotional growth spurts everyone else is. Skipping a grade wouldn’t help her in this way. It would just alienate her more.

There are great reports on this topic called A Nation Deceived and A Nation Empowered.

A Nation Deceived highlights disparities between the research on acceleration and the educational beliefs and practices that often run contrary to the research.

http://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Nation_Deceived/ND_v1.pdf

http://www.accelerationinstitute.org/Nation_Empowered/