I skipped kindergarden, as a November baby… I think it worked out for the best, especially now that I’m finished with college and am not feeling any time pressure to hurry up and figure out what I’m doing with my life.
But like the general consensus is, puberty was rough, especially being young to start with, and being allowed to drive and to drink a year later than everybody else was no fun either.
I was small in the 3rd grade. When I skipped one I became real small. Sometimes a year younger was not so much. Sometimes I was an alien. It was a huge gap when they became interested in girls and I wanted to play baseball.
Imagine what it’s like when you never get interested in girls. 
Skipped 4th, combined 9th and 10th, and graduated a year earlier on top of it (finished my OACs a year ahead, so essentially combined grades 12 and OACs.)
All in all? A really bad, bad idea for a number of reasons. Wunderkind or no. I was way too young to be working when I was, and I was way too young to go away to college when I did. It landed me in a world of trouble.
This may be stretching the “skip a grade” definition, but I was admitted to college after my sophomore year in high school, and I’m very happy I went.
How did you get my life story? 
This all happened to me, too.
I had kind of a stressful day today, so I’m not really up to get into the whole thing . . . let’s just say that I skipped the second grade around 1974, and was pretty fucked up socially after that until about my second year of college. My own personality and upbringing contributed to my problems too, but skipping didn’t help.
And thanks for starting this thread. There was a similar one that unfortunately went into the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky during the infamous Winter of Our Missed Content. I remember that it made me cry because I finally felt that someone else out there understood the hell that my school years had been.
I skipped kindergarten in the early 70s, staring first grade at age 5. Was never a problem for me, and I was still at the head of my class for most of my grade school and high school career.
I also skipped kindergarten, and I now use that as my excuse for never learning how to share.
It was hard at times, especially when everyone else in the class got their licenses and started driving, but I survived. I can’t say that the year I jumped did me much good, considering I didn’t follow thru with my college graduation until I turned 30.
I always said that if I ever had a kid and was presented with the same option, I wouldn’t advance them. Instead, I’d find other ways of supplementing their learning and keeping them engaged and motivated.
I skipped 2nd grade, after about 2 weeks of it. I was asked by my parents if I wanted to, and I did. I think it worked out fine in the long run, probably helped by the fact that I didn’t do it alone. 2 other kids were skipped with me, including my best friend at the time. I don’t remember too much, but I do remember being less bored in 3rd grade.
Later in high school, I did tend to gravitate toward friends in the year below me. When I moved out of town to a different school in 8th grade, It took me a while to connect with kids in the same grade, but I had an easier time with the ones that were my age. I did have bullying and shunning issues in high school, but more because I was a nerd in general, not specifically because I skipped a grade.
I skipped 2nd grade, switching schools. It really helped academically, and since I had never fit in socially, I didn’t notice any change. It helped that I was tall. I did switch back to my original school for 7th grade, and it was weird to have the people in my old class be a year behind. Then we moved to a different state and none of that mattered
I was a December baby as well, so I was 17 for half of my freshman year at college. That was weird - I wasn’t old enough to operate the meat slicer at work. It was fun to scare the upperclassmen guys with, too.
I started school early, so you could say I started out “skipped”. My cousin, who was three days older than me started at the traditional time, and seeing as we saw each other fairly regularly, it made for some rather awkward situations over the years. The funny thing is, I probably could have skipped another grade at some point. I was never challenged, and certainly never had to learn study skills. The thing that made it easier was that one of my closest friends, who I found in middle school, was a guy three days younger than me, and in the same grade. I was never picked on, and since my friend and I were easily the smartest people in our grade, we didn’t really have an issue. Being bored in class was always just a fact of life. As far as I know, aside from allowing kids to start early, my district did not allow skipping of grades, which I occasionally grumbled about during school. However, seeing as being a year up would have put me in classes with my sister (assuming she didn’t get skipped up as well), everything worked out just fine. I was 17 for a good bit of my freshman year as well (to join the growing club, it seems).
I skipped 1st grade. It was the best solution given the criteria. I suppose that means it worked out fine. I attended a small, rural school. There was no money for gifted programs. Did they have gifted programs in the 70’s?
Anyway, I have always loved learning and think that my desire for knowledge might have been stunted if I had been held back. I graduated head of class, which doesn’t mean much coming from a small school— just saying that the move didn’t hurt me academically. OTOH, throughout my school years I felt that I was racing through my life but had no idea what I was racing toward.
I skipped grade three. It was disastrous, socially; my math skills also lagged because of it.
I skipped the first year of Junior school - which I presume would equate to the 4th grade - and from then onwards I was always the youngest in the class by a good 3 months.
When I started at University, in early October 1977, I was still 17 - just.
I skipped 7th grade, and it worked out pretty well for me. I had been very much a social pariah in grade school, and with a fresh set of faces in 8th grade (and another in 9th, as two junior highs fed into our town’s high school), I kind of got to make a badly-needed fresh start. Academically, that made things at least a bit more challenging. The only subject that I would have missed important foundational material from skipping was pre-algebra, which was taught by my father. So I had a double-bonus from skipping on that front–I got the accelerated version of it over the summer between 6th and 8th grades, and I didn’t actually have to take a class from him. (My younger sister later told me I’d missed a trip through hell. My dad was of the “why did they have to take away corporal punishment?” school of pedagogy, and his strategy for having his own child in his classroom was to be extra-strict, lest there be any suspisicion of favoritism. Plus, as he put it to her, the other kids deserve at least few days to come to understand what kind of behavior he expected; after twelve + years, we damn well should already know. )
I had a few maturity issues–my freshman year in high school, I established myself as the class clown–I really didn’t take my studies as seriously as I ought to have, and my mediocre grades for that year hurt me in the end. (Graduated only 6th in my class of ~300. 
) But the only time I can think of that it really got in my way was when I got a working fellowship my freshman year in college. Like most other physics majors, I was supposed to go work in the cyclotron, which would have been a tremendous experience. Then they found out I was only 17, which meant I couldn’t work in a radiation-risk area. 
I don’t honestly know how much of my experience was due to my smarts and how much was due to how small my school was (I eventually graduated from 8th grade in a class of 9 kids).
I was born in October. I started preschool at the age of 4. At that time I was not really any younger than the other handful of kids who also started preschool that year (there were only about 4 of us total at that time).
Once we entered kindergarten, multiple grades were taught simultaneously in the same class room. K/1/2 together, 3/4/5 together, 6/7/8 together. The year I was in 4th grade, the 3rd grade class only had 2 students, and they were both boys. I was the only girl in 4th grade, with 3 boys. My friends were the other girls in the 5th grade. We girls all spent a lot of time together, both inside and outside of school. I was a bookworm and a quick study, and the curriculum in a shared classroom arguably defaults to being self-paced. So long as I completed the homework and tests correctly, I was able to accelerate my studies and move on to the 5th grade-level materials, and even beyond, while I was still in 4th.
That summer (I randomly remember I was taking a shower) my mother came in and asked if I’d rather advance with my friends to the 6th grade and into the next room, or stay in 5th grade as one of only a few girls in the room, with the other girls being in 3rd grade.
They really didn’t have anything to do with me in 5th grade, as I’d already completed all of the coursework. I was not looking forward to being isolated from my friends. I opted to skip 5th grade.
This meant that I was only 12 years old (at least for a few months) at the beginning of my freshman year in High School, that I couldn’t drive until my Senior year, and that I graduated High School at the age of 16.
I do not regret my choice at all. I have no doubt that I would’ve been bored, lonely, and insufficiently stimulated had I stayed in 5th grade. By the time I was in High School and the age difference was socially significant, none of my peers could really tell I was younger. It wasn’t really a topic of conversation, and I certainly didn’t bring it up, at least not until the end of my Senior year when it didn’t really matter anymore. I was entertained by how surprised some of my classmates were when they found out. Of course a few close friends knew all along.
I do not mean to imply that I was by any means “popular” or “normal” in high school. I had plenty of other stigmas going for me, like being financially worse-off and from a different elementary school from way out in the boonies compared to most of my classmates, being involved in both college prep and athletics when the social pressure seemed to favor people being one or the other. I didn’t really fit well into any cliques. But…I can honestly say that there weren’t many ways in which my particular version of the hell-that-is-high-school was any worse due to my young age.
I’m sure most of the people who managed to notice that I still walked to school or rode my bike while everyone else showed off their parentally-gifted cars, assumed that my family was too poor to provide me a car, not that my dearly departed grandmother’s VW bug was patiently waiting for me to actually turn 16.
It also probably helped (for lack of a better word) that I was a budding little baby dyke back before the days of Gay/Straight Alliances, and as such I had no social life whatsoever to complicate my age in High School.
I grew up the youngest in all of my classes, bored as heck, and actually I had the mindset in kindergarten “frick, my grades dont matter till high school, so who cares if I do this stupid homework. I learned how to read when I was three, dangit, I dont want to read this story about a freggin hen. I would much rather return to Phantom of the Opera.” Course, I felt this way about math homework, and I blame that attitude of my horrid number intuition. Adding, subtraction? Dear Og, I cant do it. Vector calculus and differential equations? Bring it on, babes.
Anyway, I was always the odd one out and bullied, though looking back I think it was more because I was a stuck-up snob than smart…
I went to a private school for 7th grade and they promptly put me in 8th. For me, it was perhaps the best thing that could have happened. That year itself sucked, because it was a Christian Science school, mostly more wealthy folks…I was learning I was bisexual and was a bit poorer than the rest. I was also questioning the policies of the Bush administration and Christian Science itself, so there were plenty of reasons I was not happy there.
When I went back to the schools I had been from, it was obvious I should have been with the class above me. I made friends, I had fun, I was not depressed all the time, I actually learned how to be social, and I don’t think it would have been the same way had I returned to the class I was in before. For me, skipping a grade was the best thing socially, though considering the academics at my high school were atrocious anyway, ineffectual academically.
I graduated valedictorian in 07 at 16, able to stand on my own two feet and I am a sophomore industrial engineering student now with a really awesome co-op offer (I don’t think they know I’m 18, and I dont think they care).
Anyway, skipping a grade is really an unpredictable thing. Could go either way, and the stakes are high if you do or don’t.
I was made to skip 2nd class - change of schools and parents separating at the same time. They thought my inattention was because I was bored, but of course I was very upset at the split. Idiots.
As a consequence I was the youngest in my year, by 18 months, for the remaining 10 years of my school career. At an exclusive, expensive, all-boys school. Which specialised in bullying. Can you imagine what being the smallest and least mature boy every year for 10 years is like? I don’t recommend it for anyone.
Do you speak from personal experience, or did you just decide to take the opportunity to pontificate on the matter? People dropping their 2 cents on the matter who’ve had no personal experience or qualifications (a guidance counselor, therapist, etc) can still be found at every turn whenever it comes up that I’ve skipped a grade.
Graduated HS in 2004, and skipped the 3rd grade, at the same school. Had tested almost 3 grades ahead that year - and they wanted me to skip 2 grades. Somehow, 8 year old me decided one was a nice “compromise”.
It worked out pretty well for me - I initially had a bit of a tough time adjusting, but I know fully well that if I hadn’t skipped a grade, in the long run (middle and high school) I’d have gotten into boatloads of trouble because I wasn’t challenged.
When in doubt, go for it. But seek professional advice before, during, and after.