Welcome! Your story sounds similar to mine, where a preschool teacher told us that our DS would likely need to accelerate a grade in the future. We ended up getting our DS tested when he was 4 by a gifted specialist, to help us decide whether to go to early K. He is a January birthday. Although he tested HG+, we went with the tester's recommendation to go to K with age-mates and play another year, since we'd likely have lots of school advocacy and change (acceleration/differentiation) in the future. The recommendation was go to K, where it's more fun, but seek differentiation, and skip 1st, which is a "learn-to-read" year in our district.
Also, for our DS, K was the first all-day school experience, and he didn't want to learn to write. So kinder was a better option than starting in 1st. Since we had this info before school started, we were able to bring it to the prinicipal and gifted coordinator and ask for help. The prinicpal hand-picked a teacher who was good at differentiation, and DS ended up basically getting tutored for math at the 2nd grade level. He then skipped 1st.
Just sharing our experience, since there are a lot of different options (skipping first, going to K and skipping second). If we had gone straight to 1st, DS would still have needed differentiation, and since kindy was more fun, and he got the differentiation there, it all worked out well. Plus he learned how to do school. Depends a lot on each particular kid and the flexibility of the school.
Good luck!
