Just wanted to address that specific point quoted above - it’s only irrevocable in one direction: if you DO skip him now, then you’re committed, but if you DON’T skip him, there’s nothing preventing you from waiting a few years and then advocating and working towards a skip later in his school career if it looks advisable at that time.
For what it’s worth, you may want to consider posting this question at http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ , which is a bulletin board focused on gifted education. Those people will be more pro-grade-skip, but they also will be more likely to support their opinions with something less anecdotal than, “I skipped, and I was a miserable teen, therefore skipping is a bad idea.” It’s expensive to buy, but it might be worthwhile anyway to look at the Iowa Acceleration Scale Manual to get an idea of how to make these decisions more objectively.
One idea that I have often seen suggested over there is that it’s better to do a year of kindergarten to learn “how to go to school,” and then skip first grade, instead, if your child is still advanced.
I spend a bunch of years involved in a support group for parents of gifted kids in our district, and heard a lot of talks from psychologists on the subject. I agree with your plan.
First, we don’t even test for giftedness before the end of the second grade, because kids mature intellectually at different rates. I read at just about grade level until the middle of first grade when I went from a first grade to a sixth grade level in about a month.
Second, definitely have intellectually challenging books at home. Also work with the teacher to identify enriching opportunities. My daughter loved math work sheets in 3rd grade, and did about 100 of them beyond what the class was supposed to do.
Third, a truly gifted kid with the right support is not going to be bored. In 9th grade I knew the math easily, so I started deriving equations in math class on my own. I’m happy to say I was encouraged in this, not yelled at. I was never bored in school.
Fourth, though it is probably viewed as elitist, I’m in favor of tracking. I had an excellent high school experience because my school was big enough to have classes full of gifted students, both AP and others. That peer group was both supportive and challenging. When I went to MIT I felt right at home, and did better than some friends who were smarter than me but who were so far ahead of their class that they forgot how to work.
Finally, my parents refused to skip me, and I’m also grateful. I was young already. We delayed our younger daughter’s kindergarten for a year, and it was the best thing we could do. She is now older than her grade group, and mature enough to be able to spend a year in Germany in college pretty much by herself at the beginning.
This is what our school psychologists said, and this is also my experience. The gifted do better, the extremely gifted think about things in a different way and like to go deeply into subjects which interest them.
Our district was opposed to teaching gifted kids the next years work, though they could understand it, and preferred to teach the current material in a lot more depth.
That really doesn’t apply so much in the early years or on basic skills, where there is no ‘deeper’. You can go into much more detail with things like science or history, but with things like mathematics or reading comprehension skills, the only way to go is onwards, not inwards. There’s not really anything ‘underneath’ multiplication tables that isn’t already taught in class, so if it wasn’t possible to get me alternate instruction, they pretty much just stuck me in the corner with a stack of Martin Gardner’s puzzle books.
There was something of a problem when it came to extracurricular reading material, though. There is no such thing as fiction appropriate for a six-year-old who reads at a high school level. If they gave me things that were socially appropriate for my age, the structure was too simple and I was bored stupid, and if they gave me things that were vocabulary-appropriate for my reading level, the plot was too adult. Not too complicated, but involving a lot of stuff predicated on social situations I hadn’t figured out yet – either it went right over my head, or I skipped through it because it was boring.
The main way the adults in my life dealt with this was by handing me random volumes of the encyclopedia, which suited me fine. (I still spend hours and hours hopping through Wikipedia if I’m stuck being sick at home, or just plain bored.) The books I went for when I wanted fiction, though, were traditional whodunits. The number of Nancy Drew novels missing from my collection, I could count on one hand. There were other – less old-fashioned-ly girly – series that I checked out of the library by the armload, which I could probably tell you about if I prodded my brain long enough. I also had a special love of those five-minute-mystery things, like the Encyclopedia Brown books. The idea is that the book gives you something to sit and figure out, rather than just expecting you to be interested in the quotidian motives of Yet Another Killer or Thief.
You might also consider the merits of teaching your son another language, if he’s interested. Very little chews up extra brain cycles like figuring out how to put everything you know into words all over again.
Yes and no Arabella. As already pointed out, there are a variety of math subjects that are outside of, sort of orthoganol as it were, to the standard early math curriculum. Stuff that goes more into math as pattern building and recognition, Pascal’s triangle, Fibonacci sequence, so on. The gifted kids can get exposure to alternate concepts, like alternative base systems, so on. Reading advanced has the limits you describe, but writing has no such limits. Creative writing in particular can be advanced early on and can encourage a growth in vocabulary as a bright child learns to use a thesaurus to find the exact right, or at least different, word.