I think it really depends. We thought long and hard about it and we requested early admissions to first grade (effectively skipping K). It's had its high points and its low points.
We think DS5.5 is doing well academically. It still does not challenge him, and this is something that is frustrating to us (although I think it only bothers DS a little). DS tends to be quiet initially in the school setting until he is fully acclimated and that takes months. He did the same thing in nursery school. The effect is that his teachers aren't seeing his ability, so we still have to do a lot of advocating to get him challenging material. (This issue or rather the perception that DS is over his head is probably holding us back in our case.) I wouldn't call our story a success yet.
All day school has been very tough on the little guy. Very tough. For the first couple of months we had dealing with tantrums most days after he got home from school. Our DS is not a GT kid that doesn't need sleep. Quite the contrary, he sleeps a lot. We're almost over the hump now, and we only do "brain break" (read: 15 minute nap) about once or twice a week.
With the adjustment issues that we've had and the fact that DS is still not being challenged, I will say that there are plenty of days where we're thinking that it would have been better to have DS go to half day K and then get better enrichment at home. That was have solved this year's problem but only defer the longer-term schooling problem.
In our situation I think we would have been okay either way and either way we still have issues to content with. Think about your DS's personality, if he still naps (ours did right up until the summer before school), and understand that if he's at that level he'll still be quite ahead of his peers.
So that's our story. Still evolving...
JB
