Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How was Kindergarten for your child/ren?

DD is one term into kindergarten and already completed the 40 week course (in 10 weeks) - the teacher is amazing and doing her best to differentiate.

DD loves going because of the social side and is getting used to school culture. I really think it has helped starting her at 5 and not earlier as (even though she is exceedingly mature) the social dynamics are confusing to her, at this age she is just that much further along in being able to reason and therefore when there are difficulties at school socially, she is able to address them in a way that isn't damaging to her self esteem. I'm not sure at 4.5 she could have achieved that.

I supplied the school with her report at enrolment - I haven't mentioned it since although she does do a private gifted pull out program once a week as the school does not have a GT program. (arranged prior to school start, as school isn't compulsory until 6 this wasn't really a drama, many parents choose to keep there kids home once a week until they adapt to the new routine.)

Teacher has already advised that next year DD will be skipped one year, we have 20 weeks left and it is likely she will be skipped 2 plus acceleration.

So I guess I think that a "normal K" experience is best and then push hard for acceleration once faculty knows DS better and you also know how this school works.

DS's summer birthday meant he would have been a young 5 or a young 6 going into K. (I can't have imagined putting him in as a young 4.) We opted for young 6 to give him an additional, wonderful year at his preschool, figuring we could always accelerate if it became necessary. We also had no idea he was HG.

When it came time to have the acceleration discussion with the school, it was met with a lot of resistance. They were basing his reading ability on a test he had taken several months previous (when he was reading slightly but not dramatically above grade level), saying that the last time they skipped a kid, he was reading at the 4th grade level. Of course, not a week later, DS's reading ability skyrockets and quite obviously goes well past easy readers. His WJ achievement scores that he took later in the year came out average 4th grade ability...so go figure. Yet another reason to trust the opinions of parents.

We ended up enrolling him in the first grade of a gifted private school for this year, so we stopped short of getting a grade skip at the public school. K was a great experience for him, though. It was half day which I think made it less dull for him, and he got to meet kids his own age who live really close by and gets along with well. So there was a lot of non-academic, valuable experience for him. It's too bad the academic experience fell short.

My DD had a half day kindergarten experience too. She had a clasrsroom teacher who were truly affectionate and encouraging to her. That teacher had us read "The Spirited Child" because she recognized our daughter as a very sensitive, perceptive and spirited little girl.

After reading that book my first reaction was that my daughter had a spirited dad and my wife had a spirited husband LOL.

It was the first inkling that raising daughter was not going to be a "just add water and watch it grow" experience...

I don't think early entrance would have worked for my DD. To make it an academic fit, she would had to go from preK to 3/4/5 grade, depending on the subject matter with writing skills that are still developing.

Her K/1 program is play-based and child-centered. The irony of spending a little fortune on her tuition for her to not learn anything academic is not lost on us. Come second grade, when she is 7, school will administer a comprehensive academic evaluation and develop an individual academic plan for her.

We're still very uncomfortable with the whole idea of her being at this school but she seems happy and for now, if she is happy, so are we.

My HG son did all right in K but he was accelerated part-time to 1st and the teacher gave him a lot of his own work to do and excused him from some assignments. Basically, he got the K experience but was allowed to skip some of the K boredom. I don't know how common this is. His teacher was special. For reference, DS was reading Harry Potter in K. His math skills are not as strong but he was certainly beyond K math.

kindergarten is a waste of time for a gifted child unless a child needs it in certain areas (for instance, learning rules/social skills, motor skills like cutting/pasting, etc). If the kindergarten is focused on academics and the child is already beyond those academics, it is not an ideal situation, because the child gets very little out of it.

We accelerated DD after 3 months (and the district dragging their feet in terms of testing her, meeting, etc). She did fine in first grade, indicating that K really is a waste of time even though she missed all that material.

I didn't want to accelerate DS because of various delays. Academically he was doing great but he had motor and speech issues. The teacher did her best to differentiate some of the work, like math and reading. He fractured his skull a few months after K started and had severe double vision for months, so then it became more about survival and getting through the year than learning anything. I didn't do anything with him whatsoever but when he got to first grade he was recovered, and so far ahead that I knew we had to do something since first grade was even more of a poor fit than kindergarten, esp. with a teacher who refused to do any kind of differentiation. The work in K and 1st grade is so easy that most highly gifted kids could probably skip right to second grade and do fine (I'm not necessarily advocating that because of other issues with accelerating that much, but in terms of academics, both kindergarten and first grade are pretty much a waste of time for kids who are already reading when they start. The writing curriculum had some benefit).

My PG son has decided that he could have only done the even years of elementary school....2 and 4...if kindergarten had totally focused for him on writing (handwriting and composition), fine motor skills, play, and discussion of real literature (not beginning to read stuff) he would have loved it and it might have helped his chicken scratch he has 5 years later. Years 1 and 5 were just time place holders (three wasn't only because we grade skipped him over it). Hindsite 20/20 I wish I had homeschooled K for him and paid for OT.

Kindy was great for my HG oldest. She never wanted to learn how to read before then, and she learned that year. She loved being in big kid school, and her teacher was awesome. First and second grade were the terrible years. 3rd and 4th were bearable.