kindergarten is a waste of time for a gifted child unless a child needs it in certain areas (for instance, learning rules/social skills, motor skills like cutting/pasting, etc). If the kindergarten is focused on academics and the child is already beyond those academics, it is not an ideal situation, because the child gets very little out of it.
We accelerated DD after 3 months (and the district dragging their feet in terms of testing her, meeting, etc). She did fine in first grade, indicating that K really is a waste of time even though she missed all that material.
I didn't want to accelerate DS because of various delays. Academically he was doing great but he had motor and speech issues. The teacher did her best to differentiate some of the work, like math and reading. He fractured his skull a few months after K started and had severe double vision for months, so then it became more about survival and getting through the year than learning anything. I didn't do anything with him whatsoever but when he got to first grade he was recovered, and so far ahead that I knew we had to do something since first grade was even more of a poor fit than kindergarten, esp. with a teacher who refused to do any kind of differentiation. The work in K and 1st grade is so easy that most highly gifted kids could probably skip right to second grade and do fine (I'm not necessarily advocating that because of other issues with accelerating that much, but in terms of academics, both kindergarten and first grade are pretty much a waste of time for kids who are already reading when they start. The writing curriculum had some benefit).
My PG son has decided that he could have only done the even years of elementary school....2 and 4...if kindergarten had totally focused for him on writing (handwriting and composition), fine motor skills, play, and discussion of real literature (not beginning to read stuff) he would have loved it and it might have helped his chicken scratch he has 5 years later. Years 1 and 5 were just time place holders (three wasn't only because we grade skipped him over it). Hindsite 20/20 I wish I had homeschooled K for him and paid for OT.
