Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Advice on repeating a year

I have posted before, but we are still up in the air on a decision. I have been convinced one way and then the other.

Basically DD5 started school this year, she was only 4.5 at the beginning of the year, and she is struggling with learning to read and write. We love the school she is attending. It does have a very high academic standard, and DD is struggling. We have to decide over the next couple of weeks whether we will have her repeat K or move on to year 1. Here is the info we are working with:

At school: she is making slow progress with her reading and her writing. She has shown signs of being disengaged and her teacher feels she is finding it all overwhelming. Socially she is very well adjusted. She has friends, and she is a very thoughtful, empathetic member of the class.

She took the WJ-Cog and scored in the moderately gifted range.


The psychologist diagnosed her with DCD for fine motor skills and we have started her in OT.

A speech pathologist assessment found her to be performing above average for her age in phonological awareness skills, sight reading, and spelling

DD disengages when she makes mistakes, and she currently has low academic self-esteem, which we have been working on building up.

I see the pros of grade retention as:
With the skills she has developed this year, she start the next year at top of the class rather than struggling, so she might build up her self-esteem

She will go from the youngest in her class to being in the middle of the age range

I see the cons as:
She might see the grade retention as confirmation of ideas she has developed of being 'dumb'. She might see it as a big failure, and disengage from school.

Socially she is quite mature, I am not sure if the grade below would be as good a fit socially for her

instinctively, I feel like reading is going to click for her, and while I am sure the school will challenge her appropriately even if she does repeat, if reading and writing are the main problems, then maybe she just needs to be given a bit more time to catch up.

I just don't know what is the best decision. She might end up having to repeat year 1 if we send her on and she can not catch up.

I know most of the talk on this forum is about grade acceleration questions. Has anyone ever faced a similar decision? Do you have any advice, or questions I should be asking myself or the school?

What do you mean by slow progress? Is she on grade level? If she is on (or above) grade level, I would most likely keep her where she is. I'm presuming you had good reason to skip, and I think many kids start off slow with reading for some reason. She may suddenly take off very soon.

That said, you say the school has a high academic standard. My MG kid would have been able to easily handle a skip at most schools, but it would not have been appropriate at her gifted magnet or perhaps a private or a very high SES school.

From what you have written here I would keep her where she is.

The major concern I see in this placement is that "she is struggling with learning to read and write". Reading is developmental what I mean by that is for many kids they just need to be the right age. Reading doesn't come naturally to many kids until 6-7 years old and it's still very normal for a young 5 year old to not be reading yet. I've known kids who were bright and gifted who didn't really read until the beginning of 2nd grade and then at that time they just took off and were by mid year one of the best readers in the class.

As for the writing you appear to be addressing that issue.

So I can't say for sure about the standards in your school. But around here K standards are very low.. A gifted slightly older child can pick up the academics taught in K very very quickly.

I suggest you look at the long view. If as you you predict reading just suddenly clicks for her sometime next year, what will it be like for her in 2, 5 years from now?

Is a year of homeschooling an option?

The reason that I ask is that at the end of that year-- you could either place her BACK with her cohort, or you could place her in the year behind, as seems appropriate.

This side-steps the issue of whether or not she feels "dumb" or whether she is labeling herself a "struggler" or a "good student."

On the other hand, maybe give it another year in 1st and see then, with the idea of a homeschool 1(repeat) or gr2 year after that?

It doesn't sound as though her social skills NEED the school setting, necessarily, as that is a strength in spite of her age.

I am pretty sure she falls within the 'normal' range for her grade, she is just closer to the bottom of that range. And the range within her class is skewed toward the higher end. She wasn't technically grade skipped, we had originally signed her up for a school with a birthday cutoff 3 months later than the school she is attending. When I applied I hadn't even realised she was a month younger than the school's cutoff date. But yes, I thought she was ready to start, and that in the longer term she might benefit from being younger. I have a DS6 at the same school, and he skipped year 1. This is also a factor in our decision with DD as she knows he skipped a year, and for her then to repeat might have a bigger effect on her self esteem than the same decision would if she did not have an accelerated brother.

Supposedly the next year is a big step up academically, but if it really ends up being too much for her, there is always the possibility to repeat year 1.


I seriously considered it halfway through this year! but unfortunately, no it is not an option for us.

That sounds like good advice. Sometimes it would be great to be able to see the future! I could know if she would sink, swim, or fly in year 1. I guess I know that a skip in the future is unlikely, so it might definitely be worthwhile to have her younger if she does end up being strong academically.

I wouldn't recommend retaintion for your DD but IF her reading doesn't catch up and she is held back at the end of Year First, it would mean that your DD would spend another year struggling and then being held back. I do not like that as an option, personally.

Aye, there's the rub

If your dd's teacher has a concern that she is not keeping up and in over her head re the expectations for K, and is recommending she repeat K, they need to offer some quantitative evidence supporting their concerns. One of the pieces of information you should absolutely have to make sense of whether or not she should repeat K is knowledge of what reading level she is at (both baseline and where that falls relative to classroom peers). It's one thing for a teacher to say she's struggling, but if she's struggling enough she needs to repeat, the teacher needs to show you evidence that is based on data. Quite honestly, they should have some of that evidence for all their students anyway - most K-1 classrooms have some kind of measure in place to determine what reading level children are at.

Next thing to consider - if she's had a year of instruction in reading and its' making progress - why? It could be developmental, but it could also be a red flag that there's a challenge preventing her from making progress with reading. *IF* it's developmental, then let her go to 1st, and at some point in time in the next year she's most likely going to make that leap into being a true reader - on her own. *IF* it's not developmental, but instead an indicator that she has some type of learning challenge impacting reading, then holding her back is *NOT* the solution - she will most likely need an individualized instruction plan. It's been the experience of many of us here with 2e kids that the way to remediate the 2nd e is not retaining a child at a curricular level below their ability, but to instead place them in the educational setting that matches their cognitive ability and provide the appropriate accommodations/remediation and support that is addresses their learning challenge in that setting. That's where your child is going to make the most progress in learning how to deal with a learning challenge.

Sorry to get on a soapbox about it, but personal experience has made me a bit passionate about that subject

*IF* your dd was showing signs of difficulty adjusting to kindergarten due to maturity issues, I might consider having her repeat it - but that's the only situation, other than a situation where she's clearly falling *below* grade level and you're certain it's not due to a learning challenge.

Best wishes,

polarbear

ps - I have an acquaintance here who was in a similar position - she was told the private school her child was enrolled in would hold her back to repeat kindergarten because her reading was not at grade level. The parent's response was to switch back to public school to avoid having her child repeat K, and she had her child tutored over the summer by a reading specialist in an attempt to be sure her child wasn't behind peers in reading ability in first grade. What happened, in her case, was that the reading specialist found there was truly a learning challenge. But that's just one child in one situation. My experience as the parent of kids with 2e is that recognizing and deciphering reading challenges in young children is difficult due to the wide range of "typical" reading development plus the vary wide range of skills needed to read.

I would strongly echo polarbear. If you clearly define the problem as "reading concerns", it's not clear to me that retention would solve it - but it might create many more new problems. If there's a learning issue, more of the same won't help. If instead there's a temporary developmental lag, repeating won't help.

My totally biased, not-there, don't have all the info, two-cents worth is to deal directly with the problem area, reading, and tutor it directly (at school, home or external, whatever is most feasible).

I am a bit confused, though, trying to reconcile those extremely high reading-skills achievement scores with reading problems? Not sure what I am missing in terms of where she is having difficulty. If she can demonstrate specific skills at that kind of level, yet struggles to read in practice, that suggests you want to try and figure out what is different in the two scenarios. Vision, maybe, as a quasi-random thought? I don't know what the WJ tests look like, but I do know there's a big difference, if you have vision issues, between reading busy text vs reading single words on flashcards (with our reading remediation program, my DD almost never makes mistakes on the latter). Can you talk to tester, teachers, and from your own experience, and figure out what, exactly, is different from the tasks she performed on the WJ and the regular reading where you see struggle?

ditto pb & pp101.

As to the WJ reading assessments: the subtests you have listed were all measures of single word skills: single word phonetic and sight decoding, single word spelling and phonetic encoding. Although items are not all presented one word to a page, they are in widely-spaced single word columns, with only a handful of words per page. (And spelling, of course, is one word at a time.) Even writing samples, for a 5 yo, requires very little writing of more than one or two words at a time. (And never more than two sentences, on the WJ, even at higher levels.) So this suggests that she is not so much having difficulty learning to read, as having difficulty reading in connected text, which involves additional skills than decoding per se, such as tracking. With a Dx of DCD, one can easily imagine that there may be motor coordination factors affecting her reading, as well (the oft-noted tracking and convergence, atypical/poorly-coordinated saccades, etc.). Fluency may become an issue in the future, though at this level, I doubt the teachers are concerned about it yet.