At our school - but from what I can tell this is true more generally as well - first grade has a rather rigid curriculum, involves a lot of "seat time", and will probably be pretty boring for him. If he has to skip a grade, then, we decided in our case it should be one of the more academic grades rather than one of the less.
Finally, there's the extra issue of the second language. We are not native speakers of French at home, unlike many of the other families at the school, ...it is just a bit safer to give him another year in the French language environment.
Well, I don't know if those considerations are relevant to anyone else...
BB
Hi BB,
My DS9 went to a French immersion school from pre-K/MS through 2nd grade/CE1. We aren't native speakers either, though my French is pretty good.
In general, French educators seem to be far more open to whole-grade acceleration than their counterparts in the US. Our son was offered a skip from 2 to 4, and a boy in his class had skipped 1/CP.
Skipping 1/CP would have been a lot of work. In the CP, French kids learn all the sounds of the alphabet (not as obvious as it sounds if you're not a native speaker; ex. accented vowels have different sounds), as well as cursive writing (this starts in K a bit). Both of these tasks are pretty important and also time-intensive. The parents of the boy who skipped CP told me that their son had to do a lot of extra work so that he wouldn't have to struggle after the skip. For my DS, skipping 3 was bordering on trivial. They gave him the workbooks and he just did everything without any help at all.
My DS wasn't underchallenged in French classes in CP, though the English grade 1 curriculum was too easy for him. The advantage in that grade was that the French took up 70% of the day. This value went to 60% the next year, by which time he was underchallenged in every academic class except French language/grammar.
YMMV obviously, but I thought I'd send some food for thought. If you want to do a skip (especially of 1st/CP), I'd recommend looking into it early.
Val
