Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Public school- are these red flags?

I would say not necessarily. You may want to give them time to actually observe your child. K is really tricky, partly because most/many parents think their children are far more above average than is actually the case. This is particularly so in schools with a highly educated demographic. The other issue is that math is really a second class citizen until at least 2nd or 3rd grade. The school is focused on developing readers and writers in K and first and really don't care that much about math. I don't know how advance your DD is in math, but the school may not care even if she is doing algebra. Again, I am sure that many parents will disagree, but personally I did not feel comfortable accelerating my DS in math until his writing skills were more than sufficient to avoid the necessity of special treatment. Of course, at our school it would have been logistically tricky and labor intensive to accelerate a child in math if he lacked the requisite reading and writing skills because reading and writing constitute a huge part of math.

Quantum, just saw your post and see your point. As I mentioned earlier in this post, dd is at least at early 3rd grade level. She can read and write as good as any early first grader, so she is not terribly advanced there but def above k level. But I totally see your point about the focus being on language arts. I will wait to see how this plays out.

Met with dd's private school teacher today. She told me that since dd is academically ready for it and since there is not much the primary program can offer her next year, the director, the elementary teacher and she have met and decided that dd should skip k and go to first grade next year. The elementary classroom is a mixed age from 6 to 11 yo and dd will be the youngest as a newly turned 5 in fall. I am happy about the academic fit but very worried about putting my little baby in a class with 10 and 11 yo. When my brain clears so I can think, I will start another thread or maybe just look through past threads here on skipping a young for grade kid. But at least, this takes the public school out of the equation, I think.

My daughter skipped kindergarten in a similar situation at the same basic age as yours. I can only speak for her, but it wasn't a problem at all. It actually worked out well for her, because they saw that she needed to be double-skipped in two or three subjects. Doing this was easy in that type of classroom.

Thanks Val. Do you mind if I PM you with my personal concerns about the skip to get your opinion?

Go right ahead!