Hello! I thought I'd join up and introduce us.

We have DD6 who did K last year through our K12 charter school. Our plan initially was for her to do it for one year then go to the same school her older sister went to. K12 worked out really well for us so not only is DD6 sticking with it, but DD9 opted to leave her private school to school at home as well. We're taking it year by year at this point with both girls.

Originally Posted by mnmom23
The one problem we're having is that when people ask him what grade he's going to be in next year, he always says second *and* third. Of course that always leads to a lot of questions for me, but to him that seems normal since year-before-last his sister did essentially do 2nd and 3rd grade together. I've told him just to say 2nd, but so far it's not working! smile I try not to call any attention to the fact that my kids' academic programs are different than the norm, although I will answer questions honestly but briefly when asked, but he's not helping! On the other hand, he's just stating fact when asked and not bragging, so maybe he's got it right?

DD6 finished K and 1st grade math, reading and phonics last year. She is aware that she is doing mostly 2nd grade work so when asked what grade she is in she will say "1st and 2nd". I let her go with it and deal with any possible responses because she is just stating a fact. We've had to deal with some issues similar to this with our older DD. DD9 is coming from a very egalitarian schooling environment with an emphasis on educational political correctness. It was literally, "Don't say X,Y or Z because you might hurt someones feelings.". We had to sit down and gauge which was worse: dealing with people's possible negative responses to a stated fact or dealing with the possible emotional and developmental consequences to our child when we downplayed the truth. We decided that our first priority was to our children. We can not control how people may react to a simple statement of fact but we can control how we model dealing with these situations to our children. This is still a hot-button issue for me though as I am just now coming out of that environment that said we basically needed to hide our DD's intelligence for fear of hurting the feelings of others. It did have an impact on DD9 who was convinced that no one knew she was smart and she lost faith in her educational environment because of it. Because of that experience we stick to the facts and let our kiddos choose how they identify. wink