To add on to this, some U.S. states have different age cutoffs. So in my case, I moved from an area with an earlier cutoff to one with a later cutoff. I barely made the early cutoff, so I would have been one of the youngest anyways. When I did move, my birthday was before the cutoff in that state, so I was a full year and change younger than some of the people in my grade. Then when you consider some people that just barely made the cut off were held back, I was 1 year and 3-6 months younger than some of the people in my grade.
Sorry! I opened the thread from the subscription mail and didn’t read the latest messages before typing.
If you had a September birthday in the UK, you’d have been the oldest!! When is the cutoff date for your area?
Here in Japan it’s April 2nd and 3rd. I have two boys in my English classes who are born on those days, but they are in two different school years. Here there are absolutely NO exceptions. It’s hard on preemies born in March, as they are really very behind their classmates when they begin, yet no leeway is given them.
Sometimes birthdates do make a huge difference. My kids go to a tiny elementary school that has only one class per grade, so they had the same classmates all the way through. My son’s class had twelve kids and ALL of them were born in the last half of the year. They were really, really babyish for the first few years, and the teacher told us at one meeting in the early years that he had to think of them as a grade younger than their chronological year in order to work with them better.
Thanks for all your helpful advice guys!
My memories of primary school are of sitting at my desk with a book of my choice while my classmates were taught to read, then sitting in a corner with a book of my choice as they did reading work. I was sitting with my own maths book while they did maths… you get the idea.
I basically got given whatever work the teachers thought I could handle and was left to my own devices, joining in with my peers for art and science and sport and stuff.
Self directed learning is great- but not for a 6 year old.
If they have something more structured in terms of “gifted” teaching I’d be all for letting her be the oldest- if it’s just “well, you’re a bit beyond this- go and do something else”, I wouldn’t be keen.
Irishbaby is now two? Two? How did this happen?
The earth revolves and orbits around the sun, seasons change, time passes- babies grow when your back is turned 
Crazy, isn’t it!
I cold read anything and write in cursive before I started school. This made my teachers angry and they made the first few years of school hell for me. Also they would not let me write with my left hand. Grr.
We’re thinking about much the same stuff. Widget is also 2 at the beginning of July, and is also way ahead verbally at the minute (we’ve been having complex full-sentence conversations for a long time now, she recites big chunks of her favourite books, she can identify a lot of written letters and numbers and a couple of written words, that kind of thing). The difference is that she’s not at all ahead of herself socially, as far as I can tell. She seems to be just about average. Because of this - and because she might well not be ahead in any other way either, by the time she starts school - we’re leaning towards letting her be the oldest in her class.
Also, from the other perspective: I spent the last four years of school skipped up a year. I made great friends - we’re still close - but I think in some ways it did hold me back socially/emotionally. When everyone else was fourteen and I was thirteen, the others in the class tended to treat me like the baby - someone to be protected and humoured and played with - rather than as an equal. So I ended up being very young for my age in a lot of ways. I only really started to catch up in our last year or two of school. I’d rather Widget felt like an equal among her peers.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there is usually about two years worth of kids in any given class - some kids will be held back. So your young fifteen year old will be in class with kids who are seventeen. And kids date in highschool across grades.
I’ve posted this here before - when I was sixteen I dated a guy in his twenties. To his credit, he didn’t push anything physical - and he didn’t realize how young I was. I was a friend of his brother - and his brother was eighteen. So I must have been close to eighteen, right? Nice guy (perhaps one of the nicest guys I ever dated), but a sixteen year old dating a 23 year old would give a lot of parents the heebie jeebies.
Its hard to look at a three year old with a love of books and think forward to her being fifteen, the youngest in her class, and facing the teenage angst of boys and puberty and driving and heading off to college.
Then I think your first step is to make an appointment with the kindergarten teacher (leave a message for now, she’s super busy with end of year stuff, but may be willing to meet with you soon) and find out how it’s done today. A lot depends on the school and the teacher.
This is where it gets tricky.
The number of primary and nursery school in the local area is easily in double figures (Catholic schools, Protestant schools, Integrated schools, Irish Language schools, stand alone Primary schools, schools attached to secondary schools…you name it).
We still have to work out which ones we’ll be applying to…yet another reason why I need to get prepared early.
Kids here AREN’T held back. It just isn’t done unless a kid misses months of school because of illness or something similar. We don’t have minimum marks you need to attain to progress or anything- it isn’t really possible to fail a year.
I’ll chat to irishfella’s cousin- she’s a Primary school teacher who trained here, although she’s been working in a fancy private English Language school in Madrid for the last few years.
I learned to read well before kindergarten. First grade was horribly boring. My mom tried keeping me home from school to let the others catch up. I would spend the day reading, getting farther and farther ahead.
Finally after Christmas break they advanced me to second grade. Mistakes were made. First, no one told me this was going to happen. When I went into my classroom I was told “You aren’t in this class any more. Go to room XX.” Second, during the months I was suffering in first grade, the second graders were starting to learn arithmetic. It never occurred to anyone to give me some sort of remedial arithmetic lessons to help catch up. It was horrible to suddenly feel like an idiot in front of everybody.
As a result of this move I was also the youngest, of course. So I was also the smallest and the physically slowest and weakest. I dreaded gym classes. To make it even worse, the fact that I am very nearsighted wasn’t picked up for another two years. I could see a book just fine. That softball, not so much. I was horrible at all the organized sports. In those days the gym teachers selected two team captains and then let them pick their team members. At the end of the selection process, there were two of us left – me and an obese child. The team captains would argue about whose turn it was to take which one.
We won’t even discuss how one feels when there is puberty blossoming all around you and you are left out of that, too.
My own girls both read before kindergarten, too. The school system was much better for them than it was for me. They stayed with their age groups and had appropriate advanced lessons. I spoke with one of our kindergarten teachers the year before my oldest would enter school. She said that our town is so very diverse that they know some of the children will not know colors, and may have never seen any printed material other than maybe the TV guide. Others will read fluently. “We are prepared to teach them all,” she said. “There are a lot of basics none of them will know, such as how to study, how to cooperate, how to listen and pay attention. We have to teach those things first.”
If kids aren’t held back there, I would go for keeping the status quo (i.e. starting her later).
The hard skills like reading and math pale in comparision to the social skills in kindergarten and grade one. If you think (and have observed) that she is also ahead in terms of social skills (and other soft skills like dressing herself, bathroom handling, tantrums, independant play, etc.) then it’s possible that she could go a year early.
However, I would focus on that before the hard skills as being a deciding factor in this.
Does she have any friends who are currently working in your system? Could she refer you to them for advice?
I’ve been very lucky in that my family has developed contacts in the teaching field and I’ve been able to get current & relevant advice for the local schools - even if it’s to just wait out the school year.