Nope, not reading, according to what I am gleaning from DS7s remarks (trying hard not to pry, at least not so he’d notice!).

There is a cultural difference here though: kids aren’t expected to read before first grade/age six and teaching it earlier is frowned upon. Kindergarten is a pull out program in play based preschool and strictly about pre literacy and numeracy up to 10 only. Mine did a very structured and intense phonics awareness program but were only taught the letters of their names in order to sign their artwork. Kids who enter first grade as fluent readers are pretty reliably gifties who have figured it out on their own. Mine were both around 5.5 and that was actually early enough to lead to raised eyebrows and interrogations as to what we had done. That’s when regular US kindergartners are expected to learn!
Some parents report that their gifted kids just weren’t interested, knew their letters but preferred their Legos or whatever, but picked it up at once as soon as they were made to focus on it in first grade.

So, I hadn’t hesitated to explore early entry for my October born emerging reader because I felt confident that he’d pick it up just as well as the September born kids with birthdays before the cutoff, and early entry was decided against for other reasons. But I understand now that the younger the accelerated kid is in relation to their classmates, the more proof you’d want that they are truly academically precocious, to gain some predictability for their academic trajectory.

Regardless of where everyone else is at on entering first grade, I don’t think I’d have entered a May born 5 year old unless she was a reader already (as mine both would have been). She was probably expected to pick it up fast as soon as she was taught but now is struggling alongside her average and below average 6 and 7 year old classmates. Nor would I have agreed to accelerate my August born first grade DD9 into second if the 1st/2nd split grade teacher hadn’t been able to tell me that she was doing the second graders work and doing it better than them. DD9 is struggling hard with organising herself in fifth grade middle school now. Lots of mislaid books, homework and tests, but her grades are fine.

There are a least two kids in DS13s gifted program that were accelerated into middle school, skipping the transitional 4th grade (something the use of the IAS would have prevented, I think). In both cases, the moms have told me that a strong reason to do it was that the elementary school or elementary teacher was horrible and they wanted them out. Both struggled in 5th grade with writing and Foreign languages in particular. But the October born kid who is tall, confident and very well adjusted socially (it’s quite an eye opener when on sees all these little characters thrown together in one gifted classroom) has caught up and the May born kid who is short, still childish in 8th grade and socially struggling, is fighting retention every year. DS13 thinks he won’t make it into 9th.

I think the IAS makes everyone look at the “package”, as it were, and will prevent an acceleration that would make the kid struggle too hard.


Last edited by Tigerle; 01/19/20 02:50 AM.