Should Sarah skip first grade?

Parent Cafe
41

Our S was reading and had an extremely long attention span from age 3. He is also 5% for height and weight from birth through the present. We talked with his pediatrician and preschool teacher and opted to hold him back and have him start preschool late (have Jr K instead), to give him more time to develop socially. It was the best decision. We held D back as well, so both turned 5 shortly after they began K.

I know other kids who did skip Jr K and did great, especially folks who were taller or bigger and may have been teased about their larger size if they had been held back. So much depends on a whole host of factors for each kid, with social and emotional maturity a HUGE factor.

42

If they have any interest in college athletics dont do it!

eligibility starts 9th grade and you have 9 years from the first day to finish playing for college.

Im going to be 19 the first day of college, my best friend graduated when he was 17 last year. he was a year ahead of me and i owned him on sat and grades because i had a year longer to develop

from a lets get life started early perspective you can do it… but if you want them to succeed you want them to be older in the grade. That way they have more leverage, even if theyre smart enough to be in a year ahead.

Would you rather her be top 5 graduates or top 5%, theres a big difference and a year of extra stay at home would provide that.

43

Skipping is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. It can’t be undone.

I skipped third grade because my parents and elementary school principal were concerned that I was so far ahead of myself academically that I was bored to the point where I was always daydreaming in school. And it worked – academically at least – for the first year, when I was working hard to play catch-up with my classmates. But even then, I was having problems physically and socially. I struggled with handwriting and art because my 8-year-old fingers couldn’t meet 9-year-old standards. I couldn’t keep up in PE and was always picked last for every team. And I didn’t make friends in my new class because I wasn’t in sync with my classmates – we simply weren’t interested in the same things.

By fifth grade, I was caught up academically and I was bored again. But the physical and social problems persisted until college (when I found myself on a campus that happened to have lots of 17-year-old freshmen and I suddenly felt normal for the first time in a decade).

There has to be a better way – perhaps some kind of enrichment for the child who has jumped ahead of the pack academically at a particular stage of development. Trying to force a child to be a year older may have unfortunate consequences, and unless the child fails academically (which is extremely unlikely), there’s no going back.

If you’re considering having a child skip a grade in school, please give some thought to the fact that the decision is irreversible.

44

@Marian thats true mostly.

Most athletes actually take off a year after 8th grade before entering highschool. She could potentially do that and just homeschool her through first year courses except for english. that way she can go back to normal school and participate in classes a year ahead but be a freshman by the state standard progression plan as she needs 4 courses of english.

45

What helped for our kids was that I stayed at home when they were young and we had countless trips to the public library (our 2nd home), huge collection of educational computer games, computer, subscription and countless trips to museum and aquarium and zoo. H and I were the enrichment and the kids enjoyed chatting with us and all the many adults in their world about their many, varied interests and concerns. Our kids were reading at levels beyond many of their peers, but it never bothered them.

It was actually very fortunate that academically both kids were accelerated. Both ended up with long term chronic health problems and only because of their ability to study and work independently were they able to complete their coursework and transition well into college.

46

@SeniorStruggling, thanks for bringing the athlete’s perspective into this discussion. It’s something that many of us are not familiar with.

47

@Marian :slight_smile: happy to help. My friend ended up taking a gap year and withdrawing from school because he didn’t get offered a good scholarship. This year he has a full ride on the table from Boston U

Please accelerate your kids coursework op…But please don’t put her a year ahead. It sucks being the baby. I have friends who have gone through it and my student tourguide on a visit i took was 6 months younger than me. It’s better to be older than younger. Shoot for her to be 18 the bulk of her senior year. This way she can possibly take a whole extra year of highschool credits and graduate after 2-2.5 years in college!

48

S1 has a November birthday in a school district that at the time had a 12/31 cutoff. We took the preschool’s advice and redshirted him when it was time for K, even though he was reading at a 3rd grade level at 4.5. As a result, he was one of the oldest in kindergarten. This bonus year gave us the chance to see that his “issues” were not those of immaturity, but that he had sensory integration issues and ADD. As the school’s request, we also got an ed psych eval which was enlightening and confirmed a lot of things we had suspected. As our ped (a HS debating friend of DH’s from Bronx Science) put it, the extra year enabled us to “unstring the spaghetti” and we were able to get appropriate help for him. At the end of K, the school recommended he go straight to second grade. He did, and was 5 yr. 10 mo. old.

It was harder socially when he was younger (noone was interested in the Zoombinis and Redwall), but once he got into some specialized highly gifted programs in fourth grade, things improved tremendously. (Fortunately, he was oblivious to the truly toxic 3rd grade teacher at the neighborhood school.) The HG programs offered subject acceleration and he wound up skipping 4.5 years of math and doing a lot of CS independently (the STEM middle school and high school programs also offered lots of programming, but he was way ahead of the curve there). The best part was that he got to take these classes with his age peers, so we didn’t have to deal with a nine year old going to middle school or early college. The specialized high school STEM program offered complex analysis, lin alg, diff eq, etc. While he could have gone to the nearby flagship for those, he recognized that was a bit out of his comfort zone. Fine with us. His call. He started college at 17 and was fine. Got a math degree and is a software engineer. Is now 25 and still doesn’t drive. :slight_smile:
As an adult, he has told us that in all seriousness, the STEM programs saved his life.

S2 has a Feb. birthday and has always been the tallest guy in the class. Has very good social skills, too, but a lot of LD issues. He was in a 1st/2nd combo class and went with the second graders for reading and math. He also did the HG programs from 4th through HS), but he’s strong across the board vs. his brother, who is very deep in some areas. Skipping a grade came up with S2, but the idea stressed him, and he had a lot of friends and non-classroom interests, so we let it drop and didn’t look back.

When I was in K, the school wanted to skip me at midyear into second grade. (I turned six just after starting K. Was tall and reading at 5th grade level.) Parents said no. At the end of 1st grade, in another school, the school wanted me to skip 2nd and go into 3rd. This time, they said yes. I spent the first quarter in third grade, then the military moved us to another state, where they refused to recognize the skip. Back to 2nd I went. I was always one of the oldest kids and was bored. The teachers used to give me tests to grade (!), independent work and big meaty novels. I spent most of junior high reading history, following Watergate and embroidering during class. In high school I joined everything to keep myself intellectually engaged.

My maternal grandmother skipped two grades and graduated at 15. Instead of being able to accept the scholarship she’d earned, she had to go to work to support the family (1933). She was bitter the rest of her life about that!

tl;dr – It really depends on the kid. One of mine, with the social skills issues) really needed the skip (and more). The other, with similar scores in ed psych testing and great social skills, didn’t need it.

49

I think it depends on the kid, I am uncomfortable when I read things that I have from those who say “no! It will be an absolute disaster” or those who say “Of course, it is great”. My answer to this would be to ask the parent why they wanted to do this, or why the kid did. Is it that the kid is bored in school, that they are ‘learning’ things they already know, or do they learn fast, and find they are twiddling their thumbs (or worse, the typical response from many teachers, they give them more worksheets of the same level of material as ‘make work’.). The other issue can be that some kids emotionally develop faster, and find kinship with older kids, and for them, it may make sense to skip them.

I personally am not sure skipping is the way to go, but unfortunately our education system, being in the hands of school administrators and the NEA, are not exactly very good at being flexible with kids, and it may be the only thing you can do to make sure the kid is challenged and doesn’t zone out. One of the standard lines is that parents can ‘fill in the gaps’, but there is a big problem with that, kids spend much of their day in school, and if it is stifling them, if it is not fulfilling their potential, it can be very, very hard to mitigate the damage. Stories like the teacher teaching reading forcing a kid who finished the whole ‘reading book’ in a couple of days, to slog through it with the other kids, are legion out there. Some schools allow kids, for example, to take math with older kids, while staying in their grade, but those are few and far between, so skipping, with the negatives it can have, may be the lesser of two evils, and for some kids might be just what makes them fly. I saw the other side of that, my mom graduated from high school at 14 in the NYC public schools when they were the best in the world, and I think doing that hurt her (from what I recall her saying, the year she graduated there were at least several hundreds of kids graduating who were 16 or younger in the NYC public schools graduating, and a later study that she was one of the subjects found that a large percentage of them had social and other issues), but given how unbelievably intelligent she was, I suspect if left to go a normal course through the schools, it might have been as bad or maybe even worse.

In this world of common core curricula, teaching to standardized tests and such, it probably will make it much worse on kids who are out there, and it is kind of sad that skipping is the only way the schools think they can deal with kids on the outer shoulders of the bell curve, but in many places that may be the only way.

50

In my own world, I have never heard of an athlete taking off after 8th, unless we mean some Olympics potential.

51

When we put my middle one ahead I scoured the area for other options. We were living in a large town in the rural Midwest. No self contained gifted programs. The only private school in town was a very conservative religious school. Limited options for enrichment. This seemed like the best of few options. She ended up needing more acceleration in math and by 4th grade was going to the middle school for pre-algebra. I have no regrets, although in high school she took up a sport that she ended up pursuing through college and another year of physical maturity might have made her more competitive. Being the oldest is not necessarily the best. Studies show that it’s good to be at the older end if you are there naturally but not if you are held out to do it. Those kids way at the end of the bell curve are not going to be like everyone else no matter what. The important thing is to find an environment that affirms who they are.

52

I have a November birthday so I started college when I was 17. Huge mistake. Socially not academically. My brother is 10 months younger than me. He went to college at almost 18. Also big mistake. Would not do that to one of my kids. Oldest son birthday was in mid September he missed the school cutoff so he was 18 in his senior year. Much better for him. He is now 21 and a college Junior. I don’t believe he would have been socially ready for college a year earlier. Middle sons birthday is in mid August. He made the cutoff by a couple weeks. I did not send him to school at 5. He is now 17 and a high school Junior. I can not imagine him being a Senior this year. He is in no way socially ready for college. I think you really need to look at the social aspect more than the academic one.

53

Thanks to poor parenting, my son wasn’t advanced when we moved to FL. I didn’t push for him to skip a grade. He went thru elementary school at a private school. He had a nice group of friends, and was pulled out of class for math and English. In the year ahead, there was a group that was not so nice.

When son asked to leave HS as a junior, I went along with it. I still think it was better at that end than when he was young. Statistically, he was first born, an only, and small for his size. Socially he was a better fit where he was, being among the oldest.

54

My parents didn’t think much of it as back in their society of origin back in the '50s, people as young as 13-14 had higher expectations of behaving more as adults. Especially considering many who didn’t go on the college oriented academic track ended up joining the workforce like many other adults back then.

Another factor was that every adult male from 18 onwards was expected to complete 2 years of military service in an era when the danger of invasion was very real and civil defense classes were teaching middle and high school students how to handle military weapons just in case…including the female students*. At 17, most young men in that society would be undergoing psychological and physical preparation through HS civil defense classes in anticipation of being called up unless one was admitted to college/military academy.

Only exemptions allowed was in case of severe disability/illness and if one deferred to attend college…one must serve the 2 years after college as a conscripted junior officer. And there will be some military training analogous to ROTC here for EVERY male student unless he obtained the rare exemption from military service.

There was also the factor that my father was completely on his own from the age of 12-13 due to the Chinese Civil War and losing both parents before the age of 10 and despite that…managed to get himself the education necessary to gain admission to every university in the ROC(Taiwan) in an era when there were only 3 universities** and there was heavy competition not only from others in a similar aged co-hort…but also from thousands of older university students from Mainland China who weren’t able to complete their college educations due to the Chinese Civil War and having to flee the Maoists in '49.

Incidentally, he entered college at around 16-17 and finished college and fulfilled his 2 years of military service as an infantry platoon leader starting at 20. Completed service obligation at 22.

Considering all that, my parents…especially my father felt sending me off to college in a much more stable safe society than what he experienced around the same age wasn’t anywhere near a big deal in comparison.

  • My parents and older relatives related how my aunts and mom had to learn the basics of handling weapons...including maintaining them in the event of an invasion in middle/high school back then.

** Each university only had room for a few hundred entering students each year. While the military academies were also an option…they weren’t considered as desirable by most college-prep students as their academic reputations/requirements were much lower and attending came with a 10+ year minimum service obligation as a commissioned officer after graduating. Not very appealing for those who weren’t 100% gung-ho about making the military an affirmative career choice.

55

Rex and June got married in 1995?? They were flirting in the '80s when I last read it. I had no idea the comic was still around.

56

While most of the American elementary education is not teaching much at all, ironically, Sarah may not be allowed to skip whatever she (or most likely her parents, as a 6 y o does not know any better) wants to skip. Not sure about any type of social issues. If anything at all, skipping ahead may just broaden social horizon. At least it is proven to be so when we sent our D. a bit early to her kindergarten, just few days before she turned 5 y o While it was impossible with public schools and even some privates, some more desperate for students privates (we found 2) allowed us to place her in kindergarten a bit earlier. That allowed our D. not only to be social with her classmates, but actually be very close with the next class. I do not know how it works, she had much wider selection of friends than otherwise. I guess, the younger group never felt that she looked down on them as older kids tend to do and that made the difference. She grew up to be very outgoing person who is able to connect easily to a wide variety of people.

57

Both my son and daughter skipped a grade. My son spent half a year in first, half in second and went to third in the fall. He has never had a problem socially or otherwise. He very much needed the academic boost and the younger than peers hasn’t been an issue. He’s HS freshman now. DD skipped fifth after spending many year grade accelerated in several subjects. She’s a senior now and can’t wait for college.

Only you know your kid.

58

I was 17 when I went off to college, turning 18 in December. Like everyone else who grew up in a state where cutoffs were Dec 31 or Jan 31. ( I have a late Dec bday.) It wasn’t a big deal at all and I was never behind socially, physically or academically.

OTOH, my kids were born 2.5 months prematurely - in August but should have been October and had early developmental delays as a result. Our pediatrician wanted them to remain with the class they would have been in - which in our area is a September cutoff. So they were the oldest and actually turned 19 just before they went off to college.

59

When I was in 8th grade, I was identified as being gifted in math and the counselors suggested that I skip several grades or that I go off to college at a young age. My parents instead decided that I’d skip a grade in math and take math with kids just a year above. Best move on their part. The social awkwardness of skipping multiple grades or going to college young - no thanks.

60

I agree with the comments on being careful due to social concerns. On academics, not so sure. My state has moved the date around somewhat, but has had a cut-off as early as June, meaning kids are very old compared to national norms for start dates. Hasn’t helped our less-than-middling (low!) educational attainment.

I spent most of K-12 bored to death, stuck in 4 different public school systems that either didn’t care or didn’t have the resources for GT. We were the high sub-portion of the “high” group, set to the side because we didn’t “need” teaching nor were we a behavior problem, mostly left on our own. I know it happens all over the country. I often think what more could happen if we nourished and encouraged some of that talent in our public schools.