What we discovered was that there is a lot more to doing a language arts class than just reading level. With that two-year subject acceleration, ds was expected to do a lot more critical reading (something he'd never had experience with) and more writing. Plot, character development, predictions. All of these skills need to be taught, and my ds did have a "catch up period" going from the end of K to beginning third grade in reading, even though he'd started K reading around that level. Don't get me wrong -- he's well placed at this level. He just needs to put in a bit of effort, which is exactly what we wanted!
Just keep in mind that there's a lot more to "reading" than just the reading.
My son was able to read and comprehend at around a 5th grade level when he was five, and it was common for him to read a few paragraphs and then then talk about what he read, making up jokes and analogies and predicting what might happen. He stopped reading Magic Treehouse books after Kindergarten and I think it was because he thought the books were too predictable. He told me if I liked them so much I could read them by myself. This is also about the time he started complaining about the way some books were written and he would tell me how he thought the author could have made the books a little more interesting. He wanted rich vocabulary and books that made him think and he hated what he thought were short choppy sentences that a lot of the kids books were written in. I remember his gifted public schooled friend who was four years older was reading books like Hank the Cowdog and that was typical of what they had available in the small school library. They didn't have the kind of books or magazines my son liked to read and nothing to encourage kids like mine to keep reading.
I know the school would have required more writing than my son would have been capable of if he had been grade skipped. Because he has motor dyspraxia and hypotonia he would not have been able to keep up with the writing. I think holding back kids to the level of their weakness and not allowing them to progress in the area of their strengths is so wrong, but there are too many teachers at our public school who disagree with me. There are people in my family who disagree with me. They use my son's cousin, a high school football star, as an example. He was held back a year, which is the custom here, and made high grades all through school even though he didn't have time to study very much because football took up a lot of his time and he made a high enough ACT score that he is being offered scholarships. I knew he was smart, I never doubted that for a minute because he used to stay with me a few days a week when my son was about 4 and I noticed that he liked the same science shows and was good at answering science trivia questions. But when I showed my son's cousin how my son at four could read 5th grade level books and answer questions about what he read, the cousin still said he wasn't old enough to start Kindergarten because kids should be six when they start Kindergarten even if they are really smart.
