Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy If you or your child skipped a grade...

Familiar with up to four years of successful acceleration, full grade-skip may be regarded by schools as a last resort, because schools may be reluctant to forego the tuition and/or tax dollars which they receive per pupil per year of enrollment.

The often-reported lament that one grade skip is not sufficient as children may tend to outpace the curriculum in subsequent grade levels gives rise to the proposal that students be flexibly cluster-grouped by readiness and ability in each subject, without regard to chronological age (or "grade level"), into courses of appropriate placement and pacing.

Practices such as MAP testing may ease placement decisions, facilitating acceleration. Practices of evaluating teachers/schools/districts based upon standardized test results may work against acceleration because these are tied to a pupil's grade level; Advanced students, when denied acceleration, are believed to boost the standard test scores of a class and therefore reflect positively on a teacher/school/district. AT WHAT COST TO THE GIFTED STUDENTS, who may be disregarded as collateral damage.

The Iowa Acceleration Scale remains the gold standard in putting issues on the table to discuss the likelihood of a successful acceleration.

My 5th grade DS10 skipped 1st grade, after we suggested using the Iowa Acceleration Scale, which objectively showed he was an excellent candidate for a grade skip. Things were a bit better after the skip, but not enough. He still was not being challenged or learning much of anything new, especially in math where the teacher was giving him the same 2nd grade math he had completed the previous spring in kindy. Grrr. We ended up transferring DS midyear to an accelerated program for HG kids, so effectively he has had a 2-year skip since they are working at least one year ahead in most subjects. My DS never had any troubles making friends, but he had many more friends after the move to the HG school. There was a bigger pool of kids who shared more of his interests.

Our main reason for the skip was so that our son would have the chance to learn new things and be challenged. He is rather unmotivated on his own, and a teacher pleaser, so he could easily have gone under the radar and skated by without ever learning a thing.

If I had known that grade skipping existed, I would have begged for it as a child! Instead, I settled for "skipping" my senior year of high school, going full-time to the local university through PSEO (dual enrollment).

While you know yourself best, so many children have issues at this age... is it possible that the issues were not related to the grade skip, but may have occurred regardless?

This may depend in part on his/your definition of "peers"... chronological age? intellectual peers? academic peers? Some families find it helpful to develop several sets of peers/friends/acquaintances through various interests, extracurricular activities, clubs, camps, etc.

I think that both ideas commonly apply.

My eldest skipped two grades. He had trouble fitting in when he was and 11-year-old 8th grader and the other kids were 13/14. There's just no getting around the physical differences at that age. He's getting closer to 14 and now seems to fit in better, given that he's maturing physically.

My grade-skipped daughter is 9. She has a very late birthday (a couple days before the cutoff), and so is younger than most or all of the kids a grade behind her. She's lucky to be quite tall and very social. She has a lot of friends, but still mentions that sometimes the other girls talk about things she "doesn't understand yet." We're moving her to a school that groups kids by ability instead of age next year, and I suspect that this will be less of a problem.

Different people have different experiences with grade skips, and IMO, it's an area full of nuances. I agree that there are intellectual peers and physical peers ---but sometimes I think about the fact that a (highly) gifted mind simply works differently from an NT mind, and making connections with older students just because they're older may not necessarily be easy. The older kids may have developed more mentally, but if their minds don't work the same way as the HG child's does, they may not be able to connect anyway. KWIM?

DD5 skipped mid-year into K at a small private school. She's now in 1st, but it's hard to say what that means. She's doing 2nd grade spelling, and will soon be in 2nd grade math. She's grade-level for reading, but many years ahead in verbal ability. We're afterschooling some math for fun (Beast Academy) but she's still frustrated by the mechanics of adding and subtracting. Because the school is so small, she gets to socialize with kids of all ages.

Bottom line: Small school with flexible attitude is saving our bacon.

One of our child's grandparents (who is still alive and likes privacy) grade-skipped one year.

Overall, it was not helpful to my family, in my opinion.

We have asynchronous development, far-reaching brains coupled with immaturity corresponding to birth age (and sometimes feels younger).

That grandparent (I think, due to lack of maturity) never reached full ability on a professional level. This can lead to a gifted person being very frustrated, unhappy, dissatisfied....

I had a professor once who told the class that our learning is cumulative, so don't skip what you are learning today or you might never make it up.

This grandparent married young and that can throw a wrench in career plans.

Also, I have posted before that I saw and heard an interview of a very young man who was working on a college degree in astrophysics, but, to what you would want for your child, communication skills did not match scientific comprehension.

Bill Gates has been documented through interviews to have been a voracious reader as a child in his local, branch library. He did not just study science.

Just our opinion. Follow your instincts. Do what works for you, your child and your family. Good Luck!

^ Adding to that, I concur that the best solution is probably a different approach, not just a "skipping" of parts of the same one.

We definitely see a difference in my DD relative even to other HG kids we know because we've chosen aggressive enrichment and compacting rather than "skipping" as a strategy: she has a more 'rounded' profile as a student and as a person. She has a wide variety of interests and high ability in many domains, but she has also had a chance to develop the supporting skills necessary to support interactions at that higher level of thinking in those domains.

Ultimately, learning isn't a solitary activity beyond some point-- and you have to develop the additional communication strategies to be able to interact with others as you learn at that higher level.

That's where life experience comes into things. Now, one can definitely say that specific trajectories go toward a more normative set of opinions, feelings, and background... but that isn't necessarily "life experience" per se...

because you can grow up extremely sheltered and wind up a 25 year old with LESS meaningful life experience than a 10yo cancer survivor has... if you KWIM. It's the ability to relate to complex ideas and communicate/explore in groups of other people that really matters on some level.

This.

See, this is the way my DH11's "homeschool school" operates. She's currently grade skipped around 2-3 years for academic classes and 1-2 years for elective type classes. But it's hard to judge as there aren't official grades or cohorts. In any case, the majority of her curriculum is middle school level, though by age she'd still be in 5th grade in the public school.

Socially, I believe this has worked out much better than a grade skip in the highly segregated public schools would have. Each class has a suggested age range and the majority of the participants cluster in this range (but that can be 4-6 years, so that's a broad cross-section of students). There are also outliers on both ends of the age spectrum. It's perfectly academically and socially acceptable to take the classes you are ready for or interested in, whether that means you're a 7-year-old in middle school biology or a 13 year old boy taking a fiber arts class with a bunch of 8-year-olds (both actual examples from the school).

The students seem to group themselves naturally into age appropriate clusters outside of class. So the teens hang mostly with other teens. My daughter's friends are between 10 and 13, which feel appropriate and in no way problematic for her in terms of maturity.

While my daughter's school has limitations due to the fact that it is technically homeschool, I believe a modified model could work for all public schools. Not that it will ever happen.

Indigo, I seem to remember that there is data showing that accelerated kids often are at the top of the higher grade. I think there are citations in A Nation Deceived. My daughter had the highest standardized test scores in her grade after being accelerated. Maybe this information might be reassuring to schools.

We found it just wasn't possible to work out something with the regular schools because they wanted kids to specifically practice questions in standardized test format even if they knew the material and because they just weren't able to be very flexible.

We found that standardized placement tests didn't help much. I was told my daughter could skip some things based on testing, but it never actually happened even when I arranged for and paid for he testing myself.

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While my daughter's school has limitations due to the fact that it is technically homeschool, I believe a modified model could work for all public schools. Not that it will ever happen. [/quote]

I agree. I'd love to see traditional schools have flexible (across-grade) grouping. But, I agree it will never happen (except maybe in a few charter or private schools). But, I believe it would solve a lot of problems we are discussing on this thread.