This is great advice !
This was inflicted on me. DON’T DO IT. Any advantages you see now will be massively overridden by much, much bigger problems down the line.
This has also been the case for every.single.person I’ve ever met who did it.l
When I was in kindergarten, I was going and reading to the first graders in their own class. I was singled out and made to take my standardized tests at a table off to the side on my own, while the other kids sat at larger group tables. This was so the other kids wouldn’t copy my test answers, I was told. By the time I finished kindergarten, it was decided that I was much farther along than the other kids in my grade, and I had been in the Gifted program all along. I was skipped to second grade, never went to first.
A huge deal was made over just how SMART I was, how advanced and precocious. Everything about school was easy peasy, and I was always the first to finish assignments, the first one called upon to read aloud (I was several grade-levels ahead in my reading skills), and generally fussed over as the poster child for academic success…
Until the first time I was actually up against something challenging. Long division in the third grade went right over my head, but I assumed it should all be so easy forever! It always had been, right? That year I became quite disillusioned with school and really kinda stopped caring, or trying. This was also about the time in my public school experience that homework loads crept into the range of hours of work, and I just was not having that.
I struggled with math the entire remainder of my school career, I still do with anything more complicated than pre-algebra. A lack of remedial support in high school didn’t help, but neither did my own malaise.
I didn’t finish high school traditionally. After beginning my junior year for the third time, I was able to step back and realize how ridiculous it was and just went and got my GED.
I don’t really have any advice one way or another about your child. It can be just what some kids need, or it can also be just the ticket to kill their confidence in the future. My only advice is not to make a child feel that being smart, gifted, talented, or what have you is THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER. Go for more of the “Yes, that’s exactly what we expect of you, kiddo!” route. It was very hard for me to learn that school got hard, when I had spent so long believing I couldn’t mess up.
I skipped grade 1 and I have no regrets about it. I don’t remember being physically much behind the rest of the class (although I’ve always been a couch potato). I was immature then, but I’m pretty immature now so I doubt skipping a grade had much to do with it.
Thanks for all the responses. I’m glad to see that it’s not just me seeing it as a tough decision. We haven’t really asked him yet partially because they just started considering it and we don’t want to get him all excited if they decide it’s not actually an option.
Kiros, I don’t know why I said his birthday is in May. It’s January. Mine is May. (I know my family’s birthdays, I promise!)
RivkahChaya, he’s in the 98th percentile for height and weight. :D. He’ll look normal. I have no clue if they can bus to other schools, but I do know the school is quite a distance to other ones.
We’re hoping to hear more from the admin and counselors soon.
This was a long time ago, in the early 1950s. I was already reading fluently in Kindergarten, but it didn’t matter since kindergarten then was mostly a socialization exercise.
The problems started in first grade. I zipped through the beginning reader (“See Jane run. Run, Jane, run.”) in about half a day. The teachers hadn’t a clue what to do with me and chastised my parents for teaching me to read, and probably doing it wrong. Fact was, no one taught me, I picked it up following along as my mother read books to me.
Mom thought maybe she’d just keep me home for a while and let the others catch up. Of course, what did I do at home? Read. The more she kept me home the better I got at reading. So she sent me back. I was bored silly.
When I got to school after Christmas break my classroom teacher told me “You don’t belong in this class any more. You should go to [Room X].” Bang! I was now in second grade. The problem here was that the second graders had been learning arithmetic for four months; I hadn’t. There was no attempt to help me catch up in that subject and it was quite frustrating. As an adult, I have often wondered why no one told me this was going to be done. It was like being thrown into the deep end of the pool.
Third grade was O.K. That teacher had taken extra education on dealing with gifted children, and there was another child who was advanced by skipping second grade entirely. The two of us went through the rest of our education as the youngest in our class.
Problems: I was always the least adept at sports, partly because it wasn’t realized until about 3rd or 4th grade that I was very nearsighted. It’s tough to hit a softball when you can’t see it, and I never developed good hand-eye coordination. And of course I was the smallest. Being the very last chosen for teams all the time was humiliating. I was developmentally behind the others also, which is disconcerting around puberty.
Both my children, and the granddaughter who just started kindergarten, also read fluently by the age of 5. In our current school system they deal with this very well. They are prepared to offer appropriate education for kids who have no idea what the alphabet is and for those who already read well. Our town is large and economically very diverse, so this is a necessity.
Once it’s a real possibility, if there isn’t a better way to meet his needs, be sure to talk with him about it and see what his reaction is.
You nailed it right there… I don’t claim to have the right answer, but I have an answer…
don’t.
My daughter is very gifted and there was talk of moving her ahead. We considered if we wanted her to be the youngest in the group that was going out on their own and driving with her friends or the oldest. We were fortunate to have a very good school system that could keep her challenged.
She did graduate a semester early from High School, but it was because of sports… they made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. She is going to spend the extra semester though so she can double major in Chemistry and Biology and then will enter the MD/PHD track. In the end I’ll pay for less than one semester out of pocket for her.
Bottom line is that I think the maturity is most important, as long as the school system can keep them challenged.
That’s what they did in my schooling. I’d spend most of my time with the people of my age in my grade, then I’d go to the university to take other classes. It is perhaps the best option.
I was skipped from 1 to 3. Until I got to high school, it wasn’t much of a problem; I was with the kids I had grown up with anyway (small town, small school). Come high school, however, I was far behind the incoming Freshmen in many ways; certainly size and maturity. I absolutely just didn’t fit.
If I had a child, I would never allow them to be skipped ahead.
My skipping happened 72 years ago and I really still haven’t recovered.
Bob
When I was in junior high in NY there were 6 SP (special progress, more or less GATE) classes, 3 of which did the 3 years of junior high in 2. My mother made me go into the class that did it in 3, which was a good move. Besides the fact I was young for the class anyway, if I had skipped a grade I would have been drafted. :eek:
I agree that it depends on how the school treats kids working above grade level. In 1st grade I went from Dick & Jane not very proficiently to reading Jules Verne. In 3rd grade reading they let me do the hardest assignment and then let me read what I wanted. I was never bored, but my schools always had enough smart kids to make full classes.
We kept our younger daughter back a year before entering kindergarten since she had speech issues (resolved) so she was always the oldest, and it worked out great for her.
If you think the teachers would not let him work at his level then skip him - but there is still variability in achievement levels at 2nd grade. Our district does not make GATE determinations until third for this reason.
Yes… the OP’s son is probably now one of the oldest kids in his grade; all of us who started first grade as six-year-olds and were born in spring or summer started third grade at age eight. He seems to only be a month younger than I was when I started third grade, and I didn’t skip a year.
I know four people who skipped grades. Of them one finished college in four years. Two of the others completed college in five or more years, neither finishing earlier than their original grade school classmates. The last one gave up on college his sophomore year. Maturity matters.
They asked us if we’d be willing to send our son to gym class with the fourth graders this year (this was at the beginning of the year-- he’s in third grade). He’d still be about the third tallest kid. We said no, because he’s unfortunately a bit of a klutz. I don’t think there are any football or basketball scholarships in his future.
He’s only five inches shorter than I am.
I never skipped a grade, but my mother did start me in school early. I actually started college when I was still just 17 years old…and took five years to graduate. (I had a rough start with college…I was not mature enough at 17 to leave home and go to college halfway across the country.)
Anyway, it sucked all through school. I was always the youngest and smallest in my class all through elementary and middle school, and well into high school. Also being the smartest in my class didn’t help. 
As others have stated, the academics aren’t the issue. It’s the social aspect that you have to consider. This is affected not only by one’s physical size in relation to one’s peers, but also by relative emotional and psychological maturity.
When my son was in preschool, he was so advanced for his age that they wanted to move him to kindergarten midway through the school year. I consented to this with the understanding that he would get the full year of kindergarten the following year, because I didn’t want him to go through what I did.
Interestingly, my son has a friend whose mother started him in school early. He was actually 11-1/2 months younger than my son, even though they were in the same grade. All through school, he was noticeably smaller and more immature than his classmates. Academically, he was at the top of his class through middle school, but completely fell apart in high school, and barely graduated.
I’m going to vote for do it.
I skipped 2nd grade, as well as my junior year of highschool and the 2nd semester of my senior year. The biggest challenge wasn’t being ‘socially mature’ enough compared to my peers. I think for the most part, kids gain their maturity from their friends, if they’re constantly hanging out with, in school with, and friends with older kids, they will mature to their levels.
School will be boring for him either way, if he’s given the opportunity to skip a grade, it’s because his teacher(s) see that he’s more advanced than the other kids. He will still be smarter/brighter/more intelligent than the kids in the next grade, but the knowledge he will be expected to learn will be more difficult and more challenging. If he isn’t being challenged, he won’t be interested.
I skipped a year of elementary school, and it worked out well for me. I had no problems fitting in in the new grade or any other social problems, and the promotion meant that I was merely very bored in school rather than miserably bored. If your child is smart enough to advance to the next grade, would keeping him back do him any favors academically or socially?
I started second grade in the fall of one year and was transferred to third grade about two months into the year.
Now, because of my late birthday, I went from being one of the older kids in class to being one of the youngest. (There were two other kids who skipped.) My friends tended to be the kids who skipped, and the kids a grade below me, throughout grade school.
I also went from always being in the “Slow Learners” box to not ever being there, but the funny thing was that for the first few weeks of class my teacher seriously thought I was slow, because I never knew where we were in the book. Because I was at the end of the book, or onto another book altogether. Then two things happened: a math test to see where we were, and a reading test to see where we were, and then I was skipped. It was not a problem in grade school. Academically I think it worked out better for me, and socially it was okay.
The other girl who skipped had some of the same issues, but not all of them. The boy did not do as well, but he ended up getting sent to the Catholic school, and he came out okay in the end.
However, along with being actually young, I was still kind of a late developer and this caused some problems in junior high and high school. I suspect I would have had these problems anyway, even had I not skipped, assuming I didn’t kill myself from boredom in the lower grade. Junior high ought to have been called junior hell.
I was one of the last people to get a driver’s license, the very last girl in 7th grade gym class to get a bra (which I did not need, except for social reasons), and felt like a mere child when I started college at 17. Meanwhile in my junior high there was a girl who dropped out to get married. There was more than one boy with a driver’s license, in junior high. Yes–an 8th grader with a driver’s license and a car.
I skipped grade 6. I’ve got nothing new to add here, except that I never did learn to spell the words that were on the grade 6 spelling list.
I learned how to read from age 3 during long stays in hospital due to a serious condition. When it was time to start school I was advanced straight to 3rd grade, mainly because of my advance reading and writing. Bad idea.
I was already a small sickly child and I never caught up socially. Being an avid reader only got me so far, and I struggled with mathematics starting in high school and it never improved. I took a year off after high school to start university at 17.
My daughter is too an early and avid reader, great at writing and obsessed with science. She’s had some trouble because she’s bored in those classes, but it would be a bad idea for her to skip the grade in which she’s the youngest already.
I am not sure I can tell you what to do, but seeing a photo of my high school graduation, and looking completely out of place there, doesn’t bring me happy memories.
Here’s our experience:
(please excuse the fact that this will sound like total bragging !)
My daughter skipped Kindergarten. She has a January birthday. She was reading chapter books in pre-school and did a Magic Treehouse book report in pre-school. She was one of those odd kids that could not only read early, but never sounded out words, never wrote phonetically, could always spell correctly, etc. She read the first 3 Harry Potter books at ages 6 and 7, in first grade. (we had her stop for a while because we thought she was a little young to continue with book 4 because that’s when people begin to die!) We could see that even in pre-school, she related to the other kids as a “big sister” or was becoming a bit of a Bossy Pants and didn’t really understand why the other kids couldn’t read. One boy was going through a book aloud and making up the story based on the pictures. She kept saying “But it doesn’t say that, you need to read the words!”
So, she went to Kinder for 3 days and they tested her out and asked to move her to 1st. We agreed. I was honestly worried that she wouldn’t make friends in K. It didn’t help that so many people try to push their 4 yr olds into K early, making the gulf even wider. It was the right move for her. She was reading Shakespeare in 5th grade and Jane Austen in 6th. She was physically very coordinated and did an individual sport, so we weren’t too worried about team sports. We did talk about the fact that if she seemed too far behind physically/socially by middle school, we’d be willing to pull her out for a year and home school so she could move back to the proper grade for her age. However, we never needed to do that. She, like me, hit puberty early, got her period at age 11 and was 5’5” at the age of 12. So that worry didn’t materialize. Even with skipping a grade, she was in the Gifted classes for Math and English/Language Arts. Now in 7th grade, she takes those subjects with the 8th grade. We definitely feel that it was the right choice for her. It was much more than just being an advanced reader; she was unusual. I was also an early and advanced reader, but not like she was and I was not advanced in math and other subjects.
However, I never would have made that decision for my son. He has a July birthday, so the age gap would have been greater, he is small and probably will be on the short side (his birth mother was 4’11”) and he wasn’t at all as mature as she was at the same age. Luckily, he is very typical learning-wise, so it wasn’t an issue. That said, my best friend’s son is the same age (same birthday), very bright and was reading before K and they were considering skipping him ahead. We talked about the fact that being able to read “Green Eggs and Ham” would not be the same gulf as reading chapter books at that age. Plus, he was on the small side, not too mature, and not very athletic. And he was still having the occasional potty accident at 5/6. She decided to leave him in the lower grade. He now is in Gifted classes and is certainly one of the brightest in his class, but she feels that she made the right choice based on maturity level.
My husband has a late birthday and always hated that he was the littlest, hit puberty later than his classmates and couldn’t drive when the others could. So, I probably would be more inclined to skip a girl ahead than a boy. I feel it’s important to set kids up for success and would rather have a child who does well and gets good grades rather than being pushed too far, too young. How far ahead is he? Do you think he will be bored in the lower grade? Does the school have a good Gifted program and what are the benefits of jumping him ahead? I would seriously consider his maturity, his size and coordination, and whether he is significantly ahead in math and other subjects as well. And does it make sense to think of him going off to college at 16 or 17? If not, reading years ahead is not that unusual and wouldn’t be cause to skip him if that’s the only reason, IMHO.
I forgot to add that my mom – a teacher herself – insisted I start in 2nd grade instead of third. I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been with a nearly 4 year difference with my peers. I would have been the stupidest kid in 4th grade. Yikes.