I skipped first grade because my family was living in Wales at the time. I learned to read and write a year earlier than kids in America. When I came back, I was fine to enter 2nd grade. It was never a problem academically.
Socially, however, it was extremely frustrating to always be the last one to get my driver’s permit, driver’s license, turn 18, and then 21. Since I’m a March baby, I didn’t turn 18 until the end of my freshman year in college! Then I couldn’t legally drink until the end of my senior year. That really sucked. I wouldn’t want that for my own kid unless they were a mega-genius or something.
To some extent, I did both. We moved a lot as a kid - and as someone who’d started school at 4 - I was regularly showing up in a new school as the youngest kid. When I was younger and stupider, I’d tell people how old I was, but once I wised up, I usually kept my age to myself. I was a late physically bloomer though, so it wasn’t better, and eventually people do find out about it, but by then you can have made your impression based off something other than “the smart kid.”
When I was in high school I decided to graduate early - I don’t consider this skipping a grade since I just left…but in order to leave with a high school degree I had to take my Senior requirements (along with my Junior requirements) my Junior year. This meant that I couldn’t take the stealth approach - these people knew I was “supposed to be a Junior” but in Senior classes. Socially, it wasn’t a terribly successful experiment - I was most successful in college prep courses where they didn’t care or in classes where I had upperclassman friends - it was a disaster in Senior Civics where I knew few people and got tagged and abused - which was not deflected by the teacher either.
So I’d say there are a lot of variables, but when you move into a new school, you get to control more of those variables - mostly you don’t have a reputation going in and no one really needs to know you are a year younger. When you move within the same school, there is gossip about who you are, why you jumped a grade - and possibly some resentment as well from both your old peers and your new ones.
The toughest part for me was driving. Once my friends started driving - a year before I did - I started to get left behind. Having access to a car in my high school meant you had a lot of friends - being the person who always needed a ride - and lived far away from the center of activity - meant it was easy to get left behind. By the time I got my license, I had completely lost the friends I’d had since Junior High (some friends, huh?) and had made new friends who weren’t even from my school.
I did grade 1 and 2 in one year. For me, it worked out very well - I still wasn’t “challenged” at the higher level, but did find classes a little less boring. My parents tell me they were concerned when the teachers wanted to move me up a level, because I was a small kid and had made only a few friends to that point in my class. They are still convinced this is why the teacher skipped my then best friend up with me. I find that hard to believe, but my folks are firmly convinced.
When I was in first grade, the school psychologist and principal recommended that I be placed in fourth or fifth grade. My sister was in second grade at the time. My parents decided to leave me in first grade as my sister would certainly have killed me with whatever weapons she would have found at her disposal.
I was instead given the higher curriculum in the lower class, with the effect of total isolation among my peers. Exception: I was given my own reading group to teach, the “slow” group. Though at age 6 I was a very proficient reader, I was hardly qualified to teach other 6-year-olds the basics of phonics. The rest of the time, I read what would now be considered middle-school books on my own. The teacher had little time for me as she had the rest of the class to teach; I wasn’t seen as needing any instruction.
When I reached the actual fifth grade, the school rounded up a few of whom they considered “gifted” students and put us together so we got some advanced work.
I was one confused, lonely kid. If my parents had found a private school or tutor for me, it would have been much better. But they had no idea what to do about my sister.
I was always an outcast, having switched school mid-year and managed to get into a fight with She Who Doesn’t Fart on my first day at the new one (it’s been 36 years and I still refuse to accept that the team lead by the owner of the ball must win). After about a month and having scared a teacher with a drawing (a sort’a-self-portrait which apparently would have been normal for a 12yo), the school asked my parents to send me to the only gifted school in the country, in Madrid. My mother refused and lectured the principal on how this was Extremely Bad Pedagogy :smack: because “she must grow up with her peers!” (she still doesn’t understand why that school never gave her a job - hint, don’t tell a principal she doesn’t know anything about child-rearing and then ask her for a teaching job), so the principal didn’t bring up the possibility of advancing me.
One of my classmates was 1y ahead. The only time this came up was on her birthday, when she’d be one number younger than the rest of us.
Since compulsory education started in 1st grade, the material seen in kindergarten 1 and 2 got repeated in 1st grade. So moving me one year ahead during those wouldn’t have helped me much (and, if I may give myself a medal, the dyslexic classmate I taught to read and who in turn taught her elder sister would have been missing that help - they’re the only fully-literate people in their very-large biological family).
Skipping 1st grade would have put me in contact with some subjects earlier, though. Instead of pre-arithmetic, I would have been doing arithmetic. We also had our first crafts class in 2ng grade and our first Phys Ed, which was taught by the regular teacher (since she wasn’t particularly sprightly, she didn’t expect us to be athletes, a distinct benefit for the klutzes like me - I have a problem with my sense of equilibrium which wasn’t acknowledged until I was out of college). From then on, every year brought some new stuff over the previous one. So maybe letting me skip 2K or 1st grade might have had me slightly less bored.
It wouldn’t have made my bad teachers better or the good ones worse, though. Those teachers who treated their subject like dogma (I realized years ago that they probably didn’t understand the subject themselves, so their refusal to explain wasn’t so much due to pedagogical approach as to inability) would still have stuck in my craw; those who can make a piece of rock interesting would still have been there when I got to Chemistry…
PS: the second of one of my classmates’ is a classmate of my nephew. A couple weeks ago, ex-classmate told SiL that myself and my best friend had been very badly treated by many of our teachers due to having being classified as “strange”. SiL told Mom, Mom told me. I told Mom that it was me, my friend, and Rosi, and Almu, and basically anybody who didn’t kiss the ass of She Who Didn’t Fart or of those teachers who couldn’t reach back far enough to wipe themselves, or who hadn’t been part of the class group since the first day of K1. Mom thought and agreed - and as she was secretary or president of the PTL for all those years, she sure had enough info to have thought about it before.
I never skipped a grade: my mother wouldn’t let the school do it, saying it was damaging for social skills and that sort of thing. (Now she’s saying I’m essentially not allowed to do four years of college, and have to graduate this May, at the end of my third year. Where’s concern for my socialization now, Mom?)
In addition, I didn’t skip fifth or seventh grade, but I did the core curriculum 6th-5th (different set 6th math book)-8th-7th (9th grade math), because I was in a combined 5-6 and then a combined 7-8 program. I was ahead in math in 5th grade, nearly finishing the 6th grade book and then we changed programs and I had to do all the 6th grade math again. In 7th grade, the only class I was in that wasn’t combined 7th-8th or all 8th but me were PE and shop classes; in 8th grade my classes had a lot more sevies. This was really weird, but I maintain that it made American history classes more interesting, because I’d already learned the world history of the same era, instead of starting in America and going out.
Both of these statements confuse me:
I thought the only point of the actual table was to have a visual reference, and the multiples were learned manually. That’s what we did at school.
Most of the kids in my class started 4th grade at 9- the few who didn’t had summer birthdays. I didn’t turn 10 until near the end of 4th grade, although I was the youngest in my class at that point.
Traveling around (Royal Air Force kid) Europe a lot as a child made grade placement interesting.
I began school in Germany at age four. By the time I returned to Scotland at age seven, I was advanced first one, and then a couple of weeks later, another grade. That put me roughly where I was in the stream of when you learn what etc. Because I was reading at a sixth grade level when I was five, I think this mislead some of my teachers. One of the detractions of ‘skipping’ was that I learned several things by memory that I didn’t fully understand and consequently had to dig for understanding later. All in all though, I just graduated grade 12 at age fifteen and ultimately the skipping of grades didn’t make a great deal of difference. From age 12-15 inclusive I spent half of each term at music school where we only played music for 10 hours a day. We all (those of us admitted into music school) had to have and maintain an A average academically or we weren’t permitted to go to Purnie Hall (the music school).
We home-schooled all of our own children and feel that a ridiculous amount of time and resources are wasted in public schools. All of our kids completed grade 12 either by or before the age of fifteen and that was without formal lessons or engaging in any kind of formatted learning. Those who wanted to go to university sat the entrance exams and other tests, including IQ tests and SAT’S, and had no problem with them.
Our youngest daughter was a published author when she was thirteen. I myself was published at age eleven.
We’re not fans of public education, including university, which we feel is a huge racket, but if you want the piece of paper you have to toe the line sometimes. Our youngest daughter put up with that (is still finishing up her last year) in order to become an elementary school teacher.
It’s entirely possible to take an illiterate adult and teach them well enough to achieve a High School Diploma in six months. It’s done often in prisons and other institutions. For reference material ask Monsieur Google about ‘Unschooling,’ it’s interesting reading.
It’s healthy and normal for kids to socialize with a variety of ages and maturities, and extra-curricular activities that mix the ages up are good. I was on the swim team and when I made senior varsity I swam against older kids but I still got to hang out with kids my own age, because the whole team practiced together.
Sure, but that’s a place where there are kids of all ages mixed together. It’s very different to be in a high school and every single person there is at least a year older than you are.
That’s why I said “extra-curricular activities that mix the ages up are good.” The hours a kid spends in class don’t have to be the kid’s whole social universe. Who they socialize and hang out with before class and after class are important too.
But if you’re in a high-school where everyone is at least a year older than you, then there are no extra-curricular activities that could engage you with kids your age. And sure you can keep some of your friends from your previous class, but as I discovered (because of a transfer), it’s not always easy.
I don’t understand. We’re talking about skipping a grade. Even without skipping a grade, there are lots of kids almost a year apart. Heck, when I was 16 my best friend had a hairy chest & beard & I was only shaving every so often. Kids mature at all sorts of different rates and one year doesn’t seem that traumatic to me.