Geofizz, that seems a very reasonable way to go. I seem to be erroring on the side of just letting things slide for this year. I don't expect my DD will learn anything at school in kindergarten and so do a very small amount of afterschooling to keep her mind engaged. Everything is so far below her level in there and although they say they are trying to differentiate, they shoot far too low and I am just accepting that this K year is a year for her to get used to this school, make friends, learn to tie her shoes and improve her writing and spelling (mostly at home). They are having her start in some sort of pull out next year even though it typically doesn't happen until second grade. Again, I think I am one of the few parents on here who isn't pushing for a skip. My DD5 is still 5 in some ways and I don't want to rush her through elementary school even though she is moving so fast academically...anyone else feel that way?
That's about exactly been our approach as well.
My daughter is very young for grade, so while we've pushed for subject acceleration, we haven't pushed more anything more. I'm thankful, particularly since we're now facing consequences of either a poor fit to her early instruction or a mild LD.
My DS missed the cutoff for kindergarten by 7 weeks, so he turned 6 in November. Despite that, he's in the middle of the age range for his class (9th oldest in a class of 20). Hello rampant red shirting. The consequence is that a skip would put him significantly younger than his classmates.
However, being a full 6 with a solid grasp on his own behavior, that process of getting used to school was complete in October, and early friendships have evaporated. He now appears to be taking the "put my head down and endure" approach to school and his peers. When we started the school year, I saw no way that it would be appropriate to put him in the proper classroom for math (2nd grade) both on maturity, reading, and writing expectations. However, now we're looking at it and thinking it would work out ok. So we're in the process of trying to tease out where the best middle ground might be for him. He craves stimulation at school. Afterschooling is not a great option for us -- it doesn't help with the fact that he wants stimulation at school, and I simply don't have the spare minutes in the day to do it. The reading instruction is differentiated in the level books he's reading, but not in pace. He is sitting with the identical 4 books for 20 minutes a day, every day. One book gets cycled from the pile each week. That's a pace that's appropriate for an emergent reader. Not for a kid who just read me 3 chapters of a DRA 30 book.
DH and I are taking the 2 week winter break to formulate our priorities. I need to call the intervention coordinator on behalf of my daughter on the first day back to school, and I will be opening the discussion on getting DS placed and taught appropriately. We still have some sort of mysterious speech/auditory problems (which is why we have the academic testing we have) that leads me to be somewhat cautious in pushing him ahead. At the moment, I want him to learn math from a human with academic peers -- that must get fixed -- and to have access to a more quickly varying pile of books to read in class. The second should be easy to fix (ha!), the second may require major changes as a result of half-day kindergarten.
