Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Anyone do a 3-5 year grade-skip? Did it work out?

I think it's great that you're so clued in to his needs when he is so young. I was quite blissfully ignorant of what to expect when my guy was 3.5yo.

I used to think older kids were cruel too when my son, like yours, craved friendships with much older children. But he's now almost 9 and I completely see his point of view. Although he loves his friends' younger siblings to bits, he has his own interests and likes/dislikes and there's little chance, extrovert that he is, that he'd spend hours playing with a 5yo or 6yo unless they are truly intellectual peers (emotionally my guy can be 4 or 5 lol).

Your K teacher sounds fabulous. However, I've had friends who were told similar things and found themselves having to pull their kids out a few months later because things just weren't working out the way they were promised. I sincerely hope this won't be the case for you.

I wanted to suggest, if you do eventually attempt to homeschool till he's 6, to be prepared to see him advance at such a rate that he'd far outstrip 3-4th grade public schoolers. We've homeschooled for 5 years now and because we've found some great friendships within the homeschool community, we've been very sheltered in the last few years. So sheltered that it shocks me when I do some research and find there's no way he could fit back into the system academically if something were to happen such that we couldn't homeschool anymore.

He's currently progressing at age=grade level, that is, he completed 8th grade as an 8yo and will start 9th grade as a 9yo. Writing is still an issue but this year he's shown the ability to show/write/prove math and produce output on par with what an average 8th grade public schooler will produce so I'm guessing his writing ability in other areas may follow suit given time and (nail-biting) patience.

Given that with these kids, they are usually able to conceptualize what is to be expressed and are just waiting for physical writing ability to catch up, and given that your child may not have special needs, he could begin to write at middle/ high school level at 2/3/4th grade age. Will your school district be able to accommodate that? It's tough!

I know that we chose acceleration because we homeschool. But I also spend so much time trying to give more breadth and depth to what he does. Good work ethic doesn't come easy and so much of the time my struggle is to model it for him. It's easy to forget though given what they can do that they're so young. I remember my own attitudes toward good work ethic developing only in my teens. My suggestion is to model it as much as you can for your child, and this includes allowing him to take his time with his work, enjoying it, learning to keep his curiosity and joy of learning alive.

It isn't as easy as we think lol. Good luck!

You misunderstood. I was writing about cases I have read. The first one was a girl on Long Island who graduated stoney book at 14 and was profiled in the news.

My daughter is only 6, entering 2nd grade. I supplement with CTY math, to accelerate, and she does Chinese as extra, with Spanish at school. I find it hard to "homeschool" the extras with limited time and it is a pain. She is 2 grades ahead in her reading, provided by her teacher this year.

But I have a plan for a 4th grade skip, that I am working on, with providing CTY as a way to keep the math on the pace it is currently on. She is very strong in math.

And, she is an extrovert. Poster child for the kid that likes to socialize. Life would be very difficult without her having friends, play dates, and the sports to use up her energy. My 40 lb kid swims in the ocean waves, diving under constantly. She needs the energy usage. (Funny, her dog is the same)

Everyone has to find a path for their individual kid and as you proceed, the path usually changes. But I would not assume that because a kid is so highly gifted, success will be there. That is the big dilimema. The not as gifted kid, who knows how to play by the rules, doesn't question so much and has that nice work ethic can outsucceed our questioning kids.

Ren

My 8 year old son will enter 4th grade this fall. He did a mid-year skip between 1st and 2nd over holiday break last year and completed 3rd grade in June. Socially, it was the most perfect solution.

Pre-skip, he was in an odd group where he was still the oldest by quite a bit with an April birthday. In CA, kids can enter K if they will be 5 by December (well they could my son's year, this is changing). So he had kids in his 1st grade class that were not yet 6 and he was already 6 1/2. This is not an ideal match for a HG+ kid by any means!

When he skipped, by coincidence, he skipped into a class that had mostly red-shirted kids. He's now 8 with most of his friends being 9 1/2. This wasn't intentional, it was just the way it worked out.

Academically, the skip didn't help for more than 6 months. He completed 3rd grade on paper but was in a reading group of GT 3rd graders doing 6th grade work. He finished 4th grade math mid-year and was left to hang out while everyone did test prep. We afterschooled a lot.

We will homeschool the next two years to try to go "wide and deep" instead of constant test prep at school.

The best advice I've ever gotten was to plan for the "least worst scenario" and to plan one year at a time. Each time we've found the most perfect plan, we've gotten so excited thinking it'll last forever! If it lasts one school year, we've learned to be satisfied with that.

Yes, ditto this! Although for us, only the last 6 months were truly successful, so I'm quite happy if something works for even 6 months.

As with any potentially perfect plan, it's just a plan, and sometimes in execution it doesn't work out quite so well. Going into kindergarten and second, we had great plans on paper, but neither really worked out. Hence the transfer mid-year second grade. With luck, plans work out enough so that you're not pulling your hair out with all the advocacy you are required to do.

I just sent you a pm with a few great books list in response to another thread, now I see this last post, girL, we could talk for hours about eductional options. How exciting!
The biggest cirriculum resource is to remember this forum. There is so much experience and information I feel like I benefit from spending time here, besides I enjoy it. There's nothing like true stories and live conversations to create a clearer picture.

Hey, we're there too! Actually I need to buy the next Singapore math soon because he's almost done and he did like 12 pages the other day. And I did one of these every few days on a whiteboard

Check out this video on YouTube:



This is our second time through and this time I'm having him copy me on his whiteboard. He already can read it like a sentence 0 x 1 = 0, instead of like a word "0x1=0" and we only did the ones this time but he answered 1x5=? Before I did. Plus it's practice writing and numbers is less writing to complete a project than words are. Someone mentioned mangahigh maths the other day. I looked at it. It has a cute flower fraction game under demos. I've showed him fractions once, this is the second time, and the second time showing him multiplication. He tried to call 1/2 one and a half.

Also, look at this


He just did this ten minutes ago in front of me. He's been telling me he doesn't know his letters lately an writing an n for a u, etc... I was actually about to pull out hooked on phonics letter cd from when he was 2 yrs old and remind him. On this worksheet he said, "how do you write a 2?" Then he wrote 7, I said no, that's an "r". Then he wrote the nine backwards and I didn't say anything. The I said "are u going to write the 2" because I saw what he was doing. I saw him try to write it backwards, pause, realize it was too hard, and write it right. I bust out laughing in his face and said, "ha! You thought u were going to write it backwards and you couldn't do it. Ha ha.". And he bust out smiling because he was busted when he was trying to be sneaky. I knew what he was doing because there's been a thread on here about it lately. Thank you other mamma's!
Sorry son, that doesn't mean you don't know your numbers and letters. It means you know them well.

But ok I'll stop and let someone with some older kid's answer. Just saying stick around because there's good advice and stories here.

I wasn't sure what "he's age-grade on reading" means. Could you explain please?

While I am sure it is true that homeschooling will allow for more advancement, realistically if he's very PG and already give grades ahead I don't think you will stop, or necessarily even slow, his fast rate of advancement by putting him in school. It can be easy to feel like you sort of have control over it by the decisions you make but for some driven HG and PG kids it will just keep going no matter what you do.

One question you may want to consider is if you have it as an option to homeschool over the long term. For a kid who needs five years grade skip I think you have two choices:

1. Homeschool (and accept all that goes with that in terms of responsibility and possible loss of wages).

2. Accept that they likely are not going to be fully challenged in school academically and that you may have to make some compromises socially. This may sound negative but it certainly works out for many kids and I don't believe there is a reason at the outset to assume that it won't.

While early college has been a positive decision for our family, I personally would be wary of a five year grade skip for a student attending school. I wouldn't want my seven year old with twelve year olds or my twelve year old with seventeen year olds. Often the halls of middle and high schools aren't the nicest of all places. I personally feel much more comfortable with early college because the people attending are adults and especially with a very young student it is clear you aren't expecting that to also be the place where they make the bulk of their friends.

Overall though I agree with the sentiment that it is only guess work. Make the best decision you can for next year and take it one year at a time.

Hi Annette,

You've got some great advice already, but I did just want to chip in that I agree with the others that 3.5 is too early to be planning too far ahead. I can relate so much to what you are saying - I had all the same thoughts as you when my PG daughter was your age and I felt like I had to make sure I got everything right. I contacted schools when she was 3.5 to enquire about early entry etc. I was really worried that she was never going to fit, that if I didn't get the mix right straight away and getting her in with older kids she was never going to learn a thing. I had read every book going, attended seminars by experts in giftedness, spoken to them about my daughter's specific circumstances and felt I knew exactly what she needed. I was convinced of it.
Then she started school and I realised that all my reading was only useful in terms of knowing what options were out there, what COULD work, etc. What I had created in my head was an ideal scenario that in reality was brought down by asynchrony and the reality that school really IS about more than academics, especially when they are just starting out. Don't get me wrong, I don't have any issues with acceleration, including radical acceleration in theory. But all the theory in the world doesn't deal with the fact that at 3.5 - even at 5.5, which is my daughter's age, they are still little kids. They only have a few years life experience.
In dd�s first six months of school we�d changed schools, reversed a grade skip and we�re planning for reinstatement of the skip down the track. The path I was so convinced of when dd as 3.5 has turned out very differently to what was planned and if there is one thing I have learnt is that there is no right way of doing this. The books are useful, the gifted experts too. But they don�t know your kid.
I was convinced my daughter needed either early entry in to school or entry in to grade one when she was 3.5 and we ended up with her starting in grade 1 / 2 composite having just turned 5. She did the work without issue and made friends easily, however we really found that her sensitivity and lack of worldliness were no match for the rough and tumble of the older kids at school. She is not emotionally immature by any stretch. Most people think she is a couple of years older than she is as she is tall and articulate and appears very calm. But she just melted down every night after school. She�s now in a kindergarten class with an experienced gifted teacher, reading 6th grade + books and working across a range of grades in maths from grade 2 up. She loves it. However socially it�s not perfect and there is only so much differentiation a teacher can manage, so she will be skipped, possibly a couple of times on recommendation, in the future.
I guess what I am saying is the path can be pretty twisty and turn-y . My kid at 5.5yo is a very different girl to the girl she was at 3.5yo. While always sensitive, just how sensitive didn�t become apparent until she was around 4.5yo, when her awareness of death and injury overwhelmed her for example. She�s now much less anxious about those things, but I didn�t see that coming for example and it impacted her ability to cope with her skip significantly. So take it year by year � even month by month and see how things go. And don�t invest too much in one plan because it can, in my experience, make it harder to see if it isn�t working.
Good luck!

Annette,

My son is one of those that is radically accelerated. At 8, he should be looking forward to 3rd grade. Instead he will be taking 2 7th, an 8th, and 2 9th grade classes this year. It works for him because of who he is and where he is at.

He goes to a very small charter school that is located on the campus of our university. The entire student body are self identified geeks (don't ever call him a nerd). They don't pick on him because they were all picked on at some point. Last year when he started, he was an anamoly for a couple of weeks. Now the other students treat him just like everyone else. They seem to have forgotten he's 5 years younger and 2 feet shorter. Sounds odd but it's true.

His school is set up to offer dual enrollment whenever it becomes needed and if he ends up in a college classroom at 10 it will be because the faculty at his school deems it appropriate. The difference is that because of his age, he will be escorted to and from his college classes and still have the full support of his current school. It is the perfect situation for DS and I count my lucky stars everyday. Who would have thought that a program like this could possibly exist in a state ranked 49th overall for education?

The key to all of this and to any of these kids is flexibility. You have to be willing to make short term plans and have long term hopes because everything can change over a summer. I would think long and hard before I would allow this kind of acceleration in the general population of a public school. I know that it wouldn't work for my son. You have to look at the individual and make your choices based on him and him alone. We can all share our experiences but just like any other population, they are all different. You know him better than anyone, you have to gather as much information as possible, cross your fingers and make a choice.