Thank you, Dude, sanne, and aeh, for your very thoughtful replies. In hindsight, as Dude suggested, it may have been a better choice to skip him in 4th. It did not seem relevant in my initial post, but we did skip my now 11 y.o. daughter, who is also in 7th grade (at a different school), and she had no trouble catching up to her peers. (When we had pushed for a long time to have my son evaluated and he ended up with learning difficulties as we�d suspected, the school had our daughter tested, too, and found that she was in the 99th percentile for intelligence; they said that her grades in school were highly discrepant probably because she was so bored and recommended we skip her immediately. She has thrived academically but struggled a bit socially, as she was already the youngest in her class when we skipped her. Overall, though, I feel it was the best decision for her. As sanne commented, sometimes they need a challenge). At the time, it was suggested we skip our son, though, we felt it was more important that he work on those �essentials� of spelling, punctuation, getting assignments in, etc. Perhaps we were short-sighted- we did not have much guidance in the decision-making process, and we didn�t want him to fall behind as his self-esteem already seemed to be plummeting.
So, to the present. As Dude suggested, we have, in fact, tried to use his desire to skip as a motivating tool. In the past 3 weeks, he has gotten all of his assignments in on time without prompting, and his grades appear to have risen dramatically across the board. After reading your comments, I think we need to focus on whether he can sustain a high level of independent functioning, and investigate whether �when motivated� can he produce lengthy, organized, high-quality work in a timely manner�?
Honestly, a significant part of my inclination to encourage a skip is that I see my son truly struggling socially, and also because in the IB program, he cannot subject-accelerate- he can only skip to the next grade. He does feel excluded by his grade-level peers and he was being actively bullied in the fall, but that seems to have become less of an issue, since one of the 3 bullies switched schools. On the other hand, he seems to get along very well with the older kids. But again, since he cannot subject-accelerate and share any classes with those older kids in the IB program and can only socialize after school (when no one has time), he is finding it very hard to form any friendships.
I am so grateful for your experience and expertise- I wish I had known about this forum 4 years ago!
