Hi -

I couldn't resist a follow up to the other thread.

here's a quick recap of our story:

My ds5 is starting K this fall but we are not able to skip him for a variety of reasons.

1. his LOG is not where a skip is clearly warranted. not reading yet, etc. (he reads a lot of individaul words but not books yet.)

2. we will be moving to a new area and are not sure which school he will attend when we get there. With the distance and the lack of a specific school, I am not able to "feel the school out" and see what they would accomodate in advance.

3. I remembered from previous threads that sometimes 1st is just more structured/restrictive, more "seat time" and less accomodating than K

All would be well and good except that he seems to be right around what is expected for the (year-end) academic standards for our state - for 1st - on everything except writing.

So, even though we have many good reasons for not skipping. I kinda wish we were. Any others in a similar situation?

thx

- EW

DS did not skip k, nor 1. He had asynchronous development. His fine motor skill was poor. He would not write, draw or cut when he entered K. However, he was at 2nd grade reading and math level. It took him 2 years to catch up with his fine motor skill. I will try to get him to skip a grade next year.

DS did not skip K but did his skip midway through 1st into 2nd. He had a hard time leaving home going to school and there were lots of tears, and I'd rather have him start out with 1/2 day K where the tears were more acceptable than having him cry all day in 1st. I couldn't even get him on the bus until February of his K year! So for us, K was used as his adjustment time to get used to being away from Mom.

After all that adjusting, we're now homeschooling! I'm glad he was in PS for 2 1/2 years - he's no where near as shy or clingy as he was when he started K.

DS did not skip K this year. From a "maturity" level, we felt K would be a much better fit for him, even though academically he was ready for 1st. He'll be going into 2nd this fall (skip 1st), and we feel he is much more ready socially/maturity for the more structured day at this point. He finished this school year (last 3 weeks) in a first grade class to help us/school evaluate his readiness for 2nd grade - so that may be an option depending on your school/district.

Hi All,

I've been busy at work for a while, but have a more flexible schedule now that summer has arrived. I've been following along when I can, though, and am particularly happy for this thread.

Our DS4 (almost 5) is going into K in the fall. He has been in a mixed Pre-K/K class this year, and most of his closest friends from the class are going into 1st. (That's to say, his closest friends were in the K part of the class.) We thought a lot about the issue, but in the end were persuaded by some considerations that several people introduced on this board.

For background, DS has been doing multiplication, division, and fractions in varying degrees of detail since he turned 4. His reading is now at about a third grade level, having advanced very rapidly in the last year. He attends a French immersion school, and we just learned from the teacher that he reads French rather fluently as well, although not quite as well as the two most advanced Kindergartners in his mixed class. His behavior has gone through some rocky periods, but has been sterling for the last six months. It seems clear he would do fine in first grade.

So why not make the move? The main reason is that Kindergarten is probably the most flexible, most child-centered, grade in the entire school. If there's any grade in which DS can do most what he wants, it's Kindergarten. 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.

There are other considerations, too. Some are purely practical: the class size in kindergarten will be smaller next year, for example, so it will just be a better situation overall. But also, we haven't done any testing yet, and we'd like to do some to see exactly where he falls. We're hoping both that that will give us a better sense for the situation, and also that it will give us some focus for discussions with the school. 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, so although his French is very good for his age, and is probably at the level of normal native speakers a grade up, 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, but maybe it's interesting to hear what we were thinking in making the decision. Looking forward to hear what others are thinking too.

BB

LOL, DS now 10 not only didn't skip kindergarten, he did it twice He was early enterenced in to K at one private Kindergarten. Due to maturity issues and concerns about ADHD, and SPD, we had him do K again at another Kindergarten before putting him in a montessori program for first grade.

While the montessori placement was a disaster, I think the second K program was good for him. He had 2 teachers that really allowed him to progress at his own pace that second year. They let him do his own math workbooks (supplied by me) read chapter books and work on the computer for writing short stories and research science topics.

However, there is no way that he could have sat through the first grade curriculm at age 5. He didn't mangage it at age 6. But I think that was more because the program and teacher were a terrible mismatch for him.

Although I am not sure if this is the right decision, at this point, DS is not skipping K. We don't have an IQ or LOG right now, so we are getting a condesending pat on the head from the school. Also, I have some concern about DS's ability to sit in his seat for a long time. He is a super active little guy & I think they will have problems getting him to be still for "quite time" after lunch. (full day K) There are also some issues with async dev. as he is not reading yet.

Despite those things, I am very unsure. I don't want his questions about science brushed aside because they don't think he will understand the answer. Or for the other kids to think he is weird because he draws diagrams of the galaxy.

This leaves us anxiously putting together a DYS app. and hoping we put a strong enough portfolio together for him to be accepted. I just finally got DS to do some tapes explaining what he knows about biology & astronomy. We still need to finish up a couple things with the goal of getting an answer by the end of summer. The extra support would be a huge boost in getting DS into the best academic situation.

(sidenote: I am sure that the app process would be a lot easier if I could get past my own denial. ND 5yr olds don't ask what helium is made of or correctly place the solar system on a model milky way or build the leaning tower of pisa out of there sisters megablocks, right?)

Sorry, I think that went a little off track.

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

DS5 will be in K in August. I'd love it if he was going into 1st for more than a million reasons, but like BaseballDad, I know kindergarten won't be a terrible thing for other reasons.

My DS didn't skip K. We considered it but decided it would be a good place for him while he was learning to "do school". In the end it didn't matter as he ended up accelerated out of K for all subjects and spent only social time with his K class. Interestingly enough, I was very concerned going in about my son's lack of maturity. We only had maturity issues when he was in the K room. When he was in the 3rd or 4th grade classroom there was never a problem.

I really envy you for having such an open-minded school for your kids. Is it public or private?

Val

Val,

Your situation sounds pretty similar to ours. Like your school, ours is really bilingual - at least after the maternelle. For the 3, 4, and 5 year olds the language at school is almost entirely French, excepting about an hour of English per week. But the ratio of French to English changes starting in 1st grade, and by 3rd or 4th grade it's about 50/50. In our case, I think the immersion has been terrific for DS. He hasn't learned a single thing about math or reading in English at school - though he does these at a pretty advanced level at home. But there's still enough challenge for him during the school day since he's constantly working on his French language skills. If it turns out that that continues to challenge him in 1st/CP, then that would be terrific. Sooner or later, though, the lack of appropriate math and reading will likely become a problem.

Just out of curiosity, how was the transition out of the French school?

BB

We didn't skip DS6.2 because A) he wasn't reading before K and B) I also heard it might be better to skip 1st because K is more free play and he is a bouncy boy, youngish for his grade. His LOG is unclear to all involved because of conflicting scores. We have the option to skip 1st this year after the 1st trimester but will probably not because he still isn't reading yet. I'm not sure why the school doesn't seem to think that is a big deal, I think they believe he will be caught up within the next half year, but we haven't ruled out 2E issues. I'm homeschooling him over the summer with an English phonemic awareness program designed for dyslexics, which our experts believe will catch him up regardless of the underlying reason for him not reading (dyslexia, dual language learning, asynchrony, lack of explicit/systematic English instruction etc.).

The problem is that he is the first one done with his work, it's always done well, and he has been goading his K teacher into giving him harder work. He already knows/intuits most of the 2nd grade curriculum in math, for example. He is tall, social, and coordinated in sports so it would seem natural to skip him, but until he's reading in both languages it doesn't make sense to me. The 2nd grade is with 3rd grade in his school, so that may be the time to skip him.

A lot of writing to say that I relate to what you're going through EastNWest. When I posted my first frantic plea for help on this site Shari asked me "What does your mommy gut say?" I try to check in with my instincts along the way, as well as how my son feels about things.

There have been more responses during the time I took to post this, my son is also in a French immersion program and we don't speak French at home, and have intentionally not exposed him to English phonics to this point. He is about average in French in his class, as well as on his English achievement test.

Hi all - I wrote a bit on the "anyone skipping K" thread, but I guess we belong here too. We had our DS tested when he was 4 to see if he should start kindergarten early, since he pretty much knew the kindergarten curriculum at age 3. The psychologist recommended not skipping K, but think about skipping 1st instead, for many of the reasons others have mentioned here, but mostly to "let him play another year" because he'd need lots of differentiation/adjustments throughout his schooling. For us, it boiled down to several factors: our DS5 has no interest in writing (but is starting to show a little interest in spelling now), he is shorter than most of the other kids, he likes to run around a lot when he's learning something, and he would be ahead of everyone in 1st anyway. We don't have a lot of school choices here, at least not nearby, but our local public is bending over backwards trying to help us out. The school tested DS earlier this year on WJ-III to see where he is academically (and socially, i suppose), they are hand-picking a kindergarten teacher who is willing to differentiate, they are even letting us recommend a friend or two to be placed in the same class. Also, the principal has said we can meet up again on a regular basis or as needed if things aren't working. So, although we haven't been there yet, we are pretty happy with the placement in kindergarten, so he can learn to "do school."

On a side note, I realize that I am much calmer now than when we first came to this forum. I was pretty panicky about whether or not we were doing the right thing. Now, I realize that DS's schooling needs will change quite a bit, and we just need to be flexible, and hope the school system will be flexible too.

It's only been a year, but not so bad. He goes to an after-school program with certified teachers and followed the CE2 program in "Mastery of the French language." So he learned new grammar, etc. It's a 4 hour/week program, and the teachers are terrific. We're enrolled for next year too.

We order class materials from CNED, which is France's official distance learning program for citizens overseas. The materials are gorgeous.

I'm going to enroll him in the French language soccer team next year to add another few hours of French, and I try to use French at home as much as possible. So far, so good.

We're in the Bay Area; if you're around here, the after-school thing might be a good option at some point. They go through grade 6/sixie'me right now and we're hoping they'll add the next grade next year (the program is growing). We didn't see any point in accelerating him in this program.

The French was a good way to address DS's giftedness through the CP. He loved the French and always had stuff to learn in French class. The next year was really good for his French, though he would have been happier with a skip that year. Whatever, though.

Val

Hi MAE -

Thanks for your reply and encouraging words. (And thanks to everyone for their replies too.)

I will try to listen to my "mommy gut". thanks for the reminder.

I guess this is also hard for me because he has been going to school for such a long time. He is already beyond used to the routine. In more than a few ways, K will be going backwards: academically, shorter day, more random social interaction...

But I will try to be hopeful that we get a flexible situation, a teacher that "gets him" and is able to do some differentiating. (is that even a word) LOL.

thanks again everyone!