Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Did you double-grade skip a young child?

No experience with skipping a young child, but my son skipped 5th and 7th and so was 11 years old when he started 8th grade last year. He was accelerated in math by an additional year.

Socially things were ok but not great--mostly because he was in an ultra small school. He has since left the school (see below) and remains pretty good friends with one kid who is almost three years older than him. I believe this kid is MG.

From a cognitive standpoint, the only correct placement was math, and that we were doing at home anyway because he needed an honors level course, which the school didn't have.

From an executive skills standpoint, it was occasionally too much--though not always--and I don't know if it was also too much for the other kids as well.

We decided to go back to homeschooling as the lack of academic challenge was actually painful for him. At home he is using a combination of high school and college materials, and I am able to tailor the output expectations to his needs.

I honestly think that we would have had to do at least one more skip and possibly two to get something approaching an appropriate academic challenge. In a few years that sort of acceleration might make sense as his executive skills will be further along and there will be less social awkwardness stemming from being a prepubescent child in a class with kids on the other side of that.

We homeschooled K-4 and we were fortunate to have a homeschool "school" locally where there was a great cohort of gifted kids my son's age. If you can find something like that, homeschooling might be your best option.