I had requested a conference with DS7's first grade teacher to hear how things are going since some changes we made in October, and to start planning for an agreed-upon skip to third grade next year. I was hoping to discuss how to strengthen DS's writing skills, his big weakness.

The first thing the teacher said to me was that she feels DS should skip to 2nd grade after winter break. She had two reasons:

1. She thinks third grade will go more smoothly if DS has some of second grade under his belt.

2. She feels that DS is completely wasting his time in first grade since he already knows most of the material.

I told her I'd bring it up with DH (who took months to convince of the skip to third) and DS, and emphasized that I won't move DS unless he is in agreement.

In the meantime, I left a message with the secretary to make an appointment with the principal. The school hasn't (and maybe doesn't) completed an IAS, nor has DS had any achievement testing, just a recent IQ test >99.9%. There's been no planning for a grade-skip yet.

I surely agree that DS is wasting his time in first grade. I might be able to get DH on board, but DS really wants to finish the year with his friends.

Any thoughts about any of this?

DD did a mid year skip last year. It was hard, but not the end of the world. Good luck!

How much planning does a grade-skip require? I have a copy of the IAS manual, but it's still unclear to me when they talk about planning, what needs to be thought out.

I'm not sure how much planning a grade skip requires, but I imagine they have to make sure there's room for your kid in the receiving class, and probably some paperwork they need to fill out to officially do the skip. Unofficially, I'd imagine you just need space and a willing teacher and kid.

As for mid-year versus next fall, my DS has a similar but not quite the same experience. He skipped first, then switched mid-year to a new district to an accelerated program. So we didn't have to deal with the questions of "why is your DS suddenly in so-and-so's class?" that you might get if you're in a small school. Since our DS was starting over with friends at the beginning of the 2nd, he hadn't really bonded hugely with anyone when we did the mid-year skip. And since the receiving class was more full of intellectual peers, he quickly made friends there and was able to move with that same class to 3rd grade, so we are glad we moved him mid-year instead of starting in the fall. He is very comfortable with his new class. If you have a situation where your DS will likely be with the same group of kids for 3rd, I'd vote for the mid-year skip just for that.

We still do stuff with some of his friends he made in kindy, though, and I'd recommend trying to keep in touch with any good friends your DS has already made. It helped our kiddo when we moved him twice to know that he still had his one good friend, even if they didn't go to school together.

I think that the message you want to send to your child is that school is about learning. So if he has to either waste his academic time OR be with friends, then academics wins. I would offer lots of playdates with the friends he likes, but the sooner he joins the new social group, the easier it will be to form the new social ties. The younger the receiving group the easier it is to join them.

Practice at home how to handle to questions - shrug and eye roll and murmur...principle said...hum hum

Smiles,
Grinity

Thanks for all the terrific advice. I'm sitting here making a list of pros/cons and questions.

This is a large school, with TWO gifted classes in each grade except K. They do mix the kids up, but he'd probably be with half his class the following year. It's a neighborhood of high-maintainence mamas, so there might be some talk.

Grinity, you have a good point about school being for academics. I can try to convince him. Ultimately, though, I'm not going to force him into a grade-skip against his will -- and it's one of the IAS disqualifiers if the child doesn't want to be skipped. Especially since he has such a good attitude about skipping at the beginning of next year, I don't think I would ruin that for the benefit of a few months of second-grade work.

I'm going to meet with the principal and teacher and see what we can hammer out.

In some ways the mid year skip can help ease the high maintenance mom talk. They don't have all summer to talk about your child. And your strategy can be that the need to do something for your child was so great that the school had to do something drastic. DD's grade skip has greatly reduced the "my kid is gifted too politics" that used to suck us in. Now she is just the youngest kid who is uber smart, rather than an intellectual threat to the other students.

My child's mid-year skip last year from 3rd to 4th was mostly positive, but not without some stress. The child had been begging for a skip for years and at the start of 3rd was sent to 4th "part-time." Schedules became complicated and he started to feel as if he had no home base and to resent the time he continued to spend in 3rd. He would do all of his "4th grade" work (which was actually 5th, 6th, 7th + as it's mixed age/grade with a lot of subject acceleration) and none of his 3rd grade work. It just became clear to everyone after about 8 weeks that there was really no point in continuing with 3rd. Bonus: I think the 3rd grade teacher was glad to be rid of me. I was always pestering her for something. Honestly, she couldn't sign that paper fast enough once the principal presented it.

Because it was 3rd to 4th, there were quite a few changes organizationally and executive function was an issue. I had to provide a ton of scaffolding for at least 3 months because after so many negative experiences I was determined to do anything I could do to help this be positive. He had never had to keep his own binder, for example, or write down his own homework. I stayed on top of it and taught him how to do the things that the other children had already had 2 months to learn.

As for reactions from the kids -- my child felt vindicated -- he had felt powerless and voiceless for far too long and his drive to be more challenged had finally led to someone (his new teacher) respecting that. His confidence has increased tremendously. He is still plagued by self-doubt when he becomes overwhelmed, but even that is starting to diminish. Being moved up was far more important to him than anything social, though he did leave behind a best friend who he adored and this was not an easy thing for him to do. We made a huge effort to have as many playdates as possible, but new friends have since been made and things have settled into a routine. We were very lucky as there were already 4 other children in his receiving class who were grade-skipped, so this is was not un-heard of. Most kids think my DS is older anyway, because he's very tall. They did "graduate" him in his 3rd grade class -- but it was very hasty as the skip happened one week after we signed the papers.

As for the parents, those in my support group were supportive, those who were not weren't told by me. Because the holidays were upon us (this happened in November) many people did not even find out until much, much later. I suspect there may be a few who still do not know. I did have one parent approach me and ask if he had been held back the previous year -- "was that why they moved him?" I just said no.

There probably could have been more planning -- to some extent we all winged it. But, in a way, that made the entire experience less stressful as our attitude was "here's this wonderful opportunity-- look at all this interesting work -- let's just give it a try." We (parents and teacher) definitely kept the focus off achievement and on engagement. That seemed to help the transition a lot.

One added bonus -- the child didn't have time to stress about the situation over the summer. Anticipation is his enemy. Action is his friend.

Good Luck!

Good point. If you do choose to skip mid-year, ask the teachers not to say anything about it - just fade out before the break, and 'This is your New Classmate George' when he enters the new classroom.

Given that this will be a gifted classroom, there is a good chance that the social interaction will be better than before the skip. If possible, set up some playdates with boys from the class he'll be entering now, and then see how fast your son changes his mind about wanting to go to school with his new friends. Once your son is convinced, then DH will be easier to persuade.

Smiles,
Grinity

When my DS changed schools mid-year, the teacher told the class the day before, which worked out well. DS's classmates had an opportunity to say good-bye, and to give him little notes. One girl gave him a very special and thoughtful little goodbye gift. I think it was good in our situation for the kids to be able to say their goodbyes. I think it will probably depend on your kiddo's personality whether you want to ask the teacher to make a big deal, no deal, or something in between, out of any mid-year skip.

Great idea.

We are working on a mid year skip now. Mr W has visited his new class once and we are talking to him about it. We'll go back right before the break, then talk about it over the two week holiday to include driving by every other day.

Whereas I personally gave a huge amount of weight to the opinion of my then-7yo.

I do think that the anticipation of the skip in the last week or two of summer was very hard on her, and a mid-year skip would have been better for her in that respect. (She also would have benefited from a few weeks or months as a 2nd grader, IMHO - she felt really behind for the first quarter of 3rd, until the class was covering material new to the other kids.)

OTOH, she was miserable and bored the last half of 1st grade, and was desperate to skip -- but if a mid-year skip had been offered to her (it wasn't!) and she was opposed to it, I wouldn't have forced her. She is the kid who needs to come to things her own way, and for her, a good "sell" works better than "this is the way it's going to be, kid."

We were somewhere in between. We knew that DS needed to skip 1st; it just was going to be too hard in the local school to differentiate so much. But at that point, DS was all for the skip. When we moved him mid-year in 2nd to an accelerated program, amounting to a second skip, he had misgivings, but we talked it through and after he visited the school, he was on board too. We let him air his feelings, but then discussed the pros and cons in a way so that he would see that the move was beneficial too. (Boy, that sounds like we tricked him!) All in all, we framed it mainly as a parental decision. DS was 6 at the time the 2nd skip decision was made.

ETA: I wonder if the studies that IAS are based on considered very young HG skippers when they made the rule that no skip should be entertained if the kid is against it. I also tend to agree with CFK that 7 and younger shouldn't be able to have that much control of the educational situation.

DS is very capable of understanding the issues here. He's one of those kids who really thinks about things and understands stuff taht should be way above his head.

That said, he doesn't get full veto power over much. That isn't at all our parenting style. He's very much in favor of a skip to third next year. If skipping him mid-year against his will to save a few months is going to ruin the experience for him, I'd rather wait.

I think you're in a great position - either way sounds good. The pros of swiching mid-year don't seem to outweigh the cons in your situation, and he'll be getting the skip in the end.

I have only had time to skim the thread but I wanted to share our mid-year grade skip experience.

The one major problem my DS had was that the staff at school had not been made aware of his skip. In an effort to not make much of a "to-do" about it, the principal didn't tell anyone other than the receiving teacher.

Day 1 of the skip, my DS was in trouble at recess for being out with the wrong kids, in trouble at the lunch table for sitting with the wrong class and in trouble in the library for coming in with a different class. His teacher did a good job of shielding him from some of the questions but she couldn't catch all of it.

It took about a week for the message to spread so that people stopped questioning him, taking him back to the wrong class, telling him to go to the office or putting him in the wrong line at morning line up.

If you care, you'll want to make sure this stuff doesn't happen! We had practiced how to answer why he was in a new class "The principal said I'd passed the tests" but not what happened when people sent him back to the wrong class!

CAMom, I hope you don't mind, but I'm sitting here laughing. Your poor son! SOmetimes these things are funnier in retrospect. I can only imagine my own son getting completely frustrated and angry when nobody believes him!

St. Pauli, I think you're absolutely right. I thik I"m going to see if the principal might allow him to go to 2nd grade just for part of the day. Even though he *is* wasting his time this year, I think it might really be best to wait a few months.

Doclori- He thought it was funny day 1. Day 2, it was a little annoying. By Day 3, he called me from the office at lunch and told me to fix it or come get him. I didn't realize how much the staff paid attention to what was going on outside the classroom!

Eh! Hilarious

My aunt graduated from high school at 16 after 2 grade skips and came back as a teacher at 20. She was not only about 5 years younger than the average beginning teacher, she is small, slight, and quiet looking. On her first day at her new job she was scolded for using the staff entrance and redirected to the students' gate, and then kicked out when she tried to get into the staff lounge.