Kindergarten Cancels Its Show to Allow More Time For “College and Career” Prep

I homeschool. In my house, “kindergarten” is a short reading lesson, and a short math lesson – under 30 minutes, total. IMHO, everything else a kid that age needs to learn happens during play time.

In a nutshell – schools and their obsession with ‘content coverage,’ not authentic experience. Get out now.

Well, I hate those shows myself, LOL. While it’s nice to say that they are all about teaching kids how to work together and bla bla bla, it seems to me it’s more about giving the teachers (and parents) more headaches. Now this year there have been a lot of snow days on top of everything else. They are squeezed for time. Maybe they were thrilled for an excuse to get rid of that “show.” Or maybe I’m just a mean cynical crabass. 😉 Plenty of kids who didn’t do a year-end Kindergarten show went on to become successful adults.

I hope they also get rid of KG “graduations.” That is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever had to watch. Why should anyone have to get a headache over coordinating a bunch of 5-6yos standing up and singing lame songs etc? My kids’ class had to sing a song about “we’re going to the first grade now” even though several of them were going to repeat KG. :/

I do think the wording of the letter is interesting. I can’t really tell whether they are being serious or a little sarcastic. Maybe this is their way of saying, “you asked for this, now deal with it.”

I’m of two minds regarding KG. When I was a kid, we learned how to read and do arithmetic in half-day KG. Then in later generations, they decided that kids were too dumb to do all that. Now the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Maybe too far, maybe not. The average age in KG is going up. Many kids who would have been in 1st grade in my childhood are now in KG. I don’t think it’s wrong for such big kids to be learning the three Rs.

I do think the curriculum developers of late have been on some sort of psychedelic drugs or something. Some of the crap they put out is too weird for even the parents or teachers to understand. But that’s not because kids are too young to learn math and reading. It’s because they are giving the task of curriculum development to incompetent people.

Send them a copy of that book you recommended to me: “Free to Learn.”

This letter reads like an SNL skit.

I don’t care if most parents red shirt their kids and don’t start them in K until they are 6 or even almost 7. I started mine at 5 and they should be able to do what a 5 year old can do, not the age of the kids whose parents decided to red shirt. I sent mine at the proper time. My kids have kids almost 8 in first grade with them and they are not even 7 yet. Its outrageous. Then they hold my kids to the same maturity and behavior standards and wonder why they fail. Because they are almost 2 years younger!

Like SKL, I was never a fan of this sort of thing, but cancelling for all the wrong reasons is worse. I’m not sure there’s a lot of valuable “working together skills” and such to be gained from it, but the mentality that we can’t do ANYTHING with kids this age but hardcore three-R’s and things that will get them higher SAT scores is horrible. There are things to be learned simply from the experience of doing things other than study, study, study. Will Kgers learn to “work together” by being herded through a show like this? Probably not. Will they get something out of it worth having? Most likely, at least for some of them.

@SKL The part of brain that allows kid to split words to letters can develop anytime between 4-7 years old. If your kids brain is there, he will learn everything easily. If it is not there, he is likely to fail constantly and be behind until brain caught up. Once the brain caught up, you will need to tutor him cause teacher probably will not. The whole thing is unrelated to how smart the kid will be once the kid grow up.

The sooner they teach reading, the more kids are going not to be ready. If the school system is rigid about what should be learned when and pushes reading soon, then I would expect more and more parents redshirting their kids.

If you have fast developing five years old, then you do not see big deal. If your kids brain is not there yet, then you are looking at years of bad time for both you and child.

I’m waiting for five-year-old interns to show up at my workplace.

As a music teacher who does performances with grade levels I will say that there are some schools who do shows with kindergarten classes that aren’t developmentally appropriate (square dancing five year olds) which means that they have to spend an extraordanary amount of time rehearsing as opposed to doing the same sort of program with first or second grade.

It could be that there was a traditional program done in the school that took a lot of classroom time and they’ve decided to spend that amount of time doing other things (like centers and reading groups).

However, if it was this much of a tradition it probably would have been smarter to just step back with what the kids were doing, have them do songs they already know instead.

Also, Circle Time will be replaced with a Resume Workshop to meet the demands of a changing world. Two times a week Drivers Ed and Financial Planning will be conducted during useless recess hours.

*In the Resume Workshop, may I suggest reviewing the importance of signing your signature ABOVE the typed name and not underneath as was demonstrated in this letter?

Snow, I was homeschooled and absolutely loved it. When I eventually transitioned to public high school and college I was at the top of my class and thrived. Here are some good places to start: https://www.hslda.org/earlyyears/StartHere.asp and http://simplehomeschool.net/how-to-homeschool/

I think the school programs have a lot of value. So many people have the whole stage fright thing and the fear of public speaking. As a lifetime performer and a person who has never had stage fright in my life, I know the solution. You have to put kids on stage at an early age. If they are used to it from an early age, it becomes not a big deal to them.I was on stage a lot for beauty pageants, dance recitals, modeling shows, school performances, etc.

It has benefitted me in so so many ways. I aced my college public speaking course for one thing. I always did a good job with any kind of presentation or speech I had to give in school. Because I could just concentrate on what I was doing instead of worrying about being nervous being on stage.

So they are doing these kids a disservice. When they have to present something in that Ivy league they are not going to do such a good job of it if they have zero stage experience up to that point. Being on stage is a nightmare for my autistic son but we work with him and still try to get him to do it. My other son is a natural at it and the more exposure he gets the better he gets. He got to do a speech by himself from memory in this year’s school program and that is great learning experience.

Yes, kids can be taught reading and writing and math at 5. It is all in the approach and the way you teach it. My son is a year or more younger than most kids in his class and yet he smokes almost all of them academically. So I know it can be done. But he gets in trouble all the time for maturity based things. So the smartest kid in the class is always in trouble. There is a disconnect there and I think it has to do with the way schools are ran now and the redshirting. They are expecting him to act like a 7 year old and he is only 6.

lollipoplover –

Evening performances are MUCH better than my daughter’s Saturday morning dance recital. I would much rather lose a couple hours of one weekday evening than have to get up and moving early Saturday, and then kill half my day, watching elementary school kids dance.

Multiple times a year? No. We do one performance a year per grade at our school.

“Yes, kids can be taught reading and writing and math at 5. It is all in the approach and the way you teach it. My son is a year or more younger than most kids in his class and yet he smokes almost all of them academically. ”

It. Depends. On. The. Kid. That’s what people are trying to say. I homeschooled five kids — some whizzed through learning to read by 4 1/2, others struggled until well past the sixth birthday. All are good readers now.

I agree that some exposure to these skills should be taught from an early age (KG should not just be 100% playtime) so that the kids ready to learn can get a start on it, and those less ready are at least exposed to it for the moment in which it “clicks.” But it’s simply not going to be the case that every (typical, cognitively normal) five-year-old is going to be ready for full-blown reading, and achieving it by the end of the year.

Not in our kindergarten. There are no dress up stuff in the classrooms. They had some in preschool. Kindergarten here is all day and it is mostly structured learning all day. They do not even do show and tell regularly.

I am not too happy with our schools. They are the school that hands out 30 minutes or more of homework every night for 1st graders and they mostly work all day long.

Well SOA, if that is the case in your school, then they need more small-scale role-play stuff in KG, not more year-end shows.

Snow, Google “homeschooling your state” and you will come up with lists of organizations that should tell you the laws. You can also try “homeschooling organizations your state”. There are lots of groups out there with various slants, if you are a secular person this group has people from all over the country who can help you out as well. http://www.secularhomeschool.com/content/

What ever happened to elementary grades k-8 being about exposing students to everything?
In gym they taught us the basics of fitness, and most team sports, just to expose us to them.
Same with art, plays, music and the like. Even the core subjects were the basics and principles to prepare us.
Now this target fixation on college will produce book smart/life stupid students.

Snow, the best route is if you know anyone local to you who homeschools, ask them about it. That person can direct you to the resources you need specific to your state and area. Failing that, Google homeschooling in your county or urban area. If you live in a more rural area, you might have to start at the state level but you should eventually be able to track down some real live people who can give you information. IMO it’s really best to talk to real people (whether by e-mail, phone, or in person) than just to rely on your own research, though some research is also important. It may be that the first people or groups you hit on might be more secular or more religious than you’d prefer, but out of that you should be able to find someone able to point you in a more preferred direction. Depending on your state, parent-directed online charter schooling might also be an option — free, with the oversight and curriculum provided to you, but with you having a good deal of flexibility as to how things get done and what “extras” you do and don’t want to include.

I disagree on the gift of time. My brother was, and still is, extremely immature for his age. He was also a June birthday so already on the young side for kindergarten (cut off is Sept. 1), and that combined with his immaturity made school torture for him. There were never any learning or other issues to merit an IEP or anything that could be treated by anything other than time (he was actually tested both in school and privately). Putting him in school on time was a HUGE disservice. He would have done much better with a younger set of peers, instead he basically dropped out in middle school.

My parents recognized this very early and wanted to hold him out of kindergarten. Instead they were talked into sending him by friends who were anti-red shirting and a school that dissuades it (still does as my daughter attends the same school and I only know of one red-shirted kid in the entire 2nd grade). It is by far their biggest regret in life.

So, while I do think red shirting can be overused in some populations, there are some legitimate cases for it to happen that have absolutely nothing to do with learning disabilities and is just a lack of maturity.

Thanks for the homeschooling info, everyone. He’s all set with socialization, none of his friends in the neighborhood go to the school he attends anyway, they are all in charter schools while he goes to the local public school we are zoned for, and the friends he has at school he never sees in person outside of school, anyway – they all Skype when they want to see each other outside of school. Wow, technology. I am looking for a secular type of homeschool group, and I did find one but it’s about an hour from my house, the local ones all seem to be religious. I have no problem with religious people, we’re just not religious. We’re secular native New Yorkers living in the bible belt, which can be interesting at times!

“[my middle-schooler is] in school for almost 8 hours every day and that doesn’t include homework”

Sounds more like a full-time job plus mandatory overtime. I don’t think I ever reached 40 hours a week on school & homework added together on a regular basis…

PS, it isn’t “red-shirting” if the reason is that the parents believe the child cannot handle age-appropriate work/expectations. Red-shirting is when parents manipulate the placement of a child who is actually capable of KG work, just to gain an advantage or make sure school isn’t a challenge.

I just wonder, for all of our lip-service about “evidence-based practice” in education, where the evidence that increasing academic expecations on kids, especially K-3 kids, is helping anything?

I have been teaching college composition courses for about 12 years now. One thing I have noticed is that, increasingly, students need and expect to be hand-held through every aspect of every assignment. Students don’t listen, and then ask you to provide them with information you literally just provided three minutes ago. Students don’t read, and then ask you to answer questions that could have easily been found in the reading. This seems to be an increasing problem, and I know that my own son (who we recently started homeschooling again after a year at a private school and half a year in a charter school) is not immune.

I’ve notice that my son will routinely tune me out when I’m talking to him, figuring that I’ll just repeat the information again if it’s important. He will ask me for an answer even when he is capable of answering it himself, just to see if maybe I’ll give it to him and he won’t have to think. He’ll ask me to give him an answer rather than going back to the text and looking for it. He has told me–although I take this with a grain of salt–that he wishes homeschool was more like his old school in that the teachers would “just give us the answers.” Is that entirely true? Probably not. But I don’t doubt that when we keep increasing academic demands, beyond what many children are developmentally capable of, you end up with teachers having to basically spoon-feed answers to their students, so that even capable students learn that it’s easier to just wait or ask than to think.

I have a friend who teaches middle school who complains about how she is expected to alert students to what they need to do like four different times. She needs to tell them in class. She needs to write it on the board and make sure they write it in their notebooks. She needs to send out an e-mail, and she needs to post it on the class website. Why? All that does is train students to not pay attention because, why bother? Why listen in class when the teacher explains the homework when you can just read an e-mail? Why read the e-mail when you can just get it off the class website? And you end up with students like I often get–and these are junior and senior engineering students, who should presumably have decent study habits–who will, after you’ve informed them of an assignment’s due date 8 different ways, still ask you when it’s due, because they’ve ignored all of them. And don’t even get me start on how few of my students even crack open textbooks. Why waste your time, when the teacher will provide you with everything you need to know for the test on Powerpoint slides? And, why bother looking at the slides or listening to the lectures when you can just e-mail them asking them to fill you in on what you should know? (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had students skip two or three weeks of class–with any excuse–and then expect me to catch them up in my office hours, as if ditching class should earn you private tutoring sessions.)

We are privileging content knowledge–which in many cases students are not going to retain past the test, if they even retain it that far–over the far more important skills of paying attention and knowing how to learn. We are giving students developmentally-inappropriate assignments that require adult intervention at every level, and leaving them unable to figure things out on their own, and unwilling to do so if even when they are able. I would take students who 1) know how to write a grammatically-correct sentence and 2) know how to read to learn–and know NOTHING ELSE about English–over students who have been writing multi-paragraph essays since first grade, that required the teacher to hold their hand through every step of every assignment because the curriculum demanded too much, any day.

SKL –

As I understood your general stance, in the many times it has come up, is that NO kids other than those with learning disabilities should ever be held out of kindergarten if they meet the minimum age to be there. There is a HUGE range of “normal” for children of young ages. The assumption that EVERY normal child born between September 1, 2008 and August 30, 2009 will be equally ready for kindergarten on August 11, 2014 is completely ridiculous. Most will be, but some won’t be. Why shouldn’t those who aren’t ready wait a year? There is no prize for getting to high school graduation first.

Wouldn’t red-shirting ALWAYS be to gain an advantage? I can’t think of a single reason to hold a child out of school a year that would not be to gain an advantage. Maybe if you were sailing around the world and didn’t want to stop to enroll in school for another year, but that would be a very small minority of kids.

@Donna, it probably is always to gain an advantage to some extent, but sometimes that might have to do with the maturity and emotional well-being of the child.

My mom tried to put me in preschool at 3. I was not ready. I cried every day, I hid under the table, I threw tantrums when I had to go. She pulled me, kept me home the rest of that year, started me again the year after, and at 4, I loved school. I loved going, I loved my teachers, I did great. I needed that extra year to mature.

With more kindergartens being full-day (in my area, you can’t find a half-day kindergarten program in a public school) and academically-intensive, I have no doubt that there are many 5 year olds who could benefit from another year to mature before they are ready to handle it. We actually started my oldest, who was extremely academically advanced (he tested as reading at a 5th grade level when he started kindergarten), in a charter school for kindergarten, only to pull him by October for homeschooling because it was just too much for him. He had previously been either home or in three-mornings-a-week preschool. He wasn’t ready for the jump to full-day school, and he lacked the maturity and self-control that was expected in a classroom where they were doing hours of seatwork every day. I brought him home, we started doing a homeschool curriculum that took us, at most an hour a day, and we still covered all the academic bases we needed to cover. But I doubt he was alone, especially for boys, in being too immature at 5 for both the behavioral expectations (such as being able to sit in a seat for 90 minutes at a time doing work quietly) and some of the academic demands (like having the fine-motor skills to do a good deal of handwriting, which he didn’t develop until he was 7).

I don’t think everybody who delays kindergarten for a year is doing it because they want an academic advantage for their child in the future. I only know a couple of people who have done this, but they did so because they were genuinely concerned that the intensity of kindergarten was too much for their 5 year olds and that their kids needed another year to mature. Their reasons were mostly emotional, behavioral, and social, not academic.

Teachers are making schools like jobs with clocking in and clocking out and giving pretend bills and paychecks! I am autistic and in a special program at the Public High School in Virginia and thats what we do in school and also do vocational tasks like hanging clothes and pretend Data Entry! What happpened to free time?

SKL –

And what is the advantage to not giving the “gift of time?”

Boredom may be an issue for kids who are ready to read, but there is absolutely no hindrance in reading ability in learning in 1st grade instead of kindergarten. Me and the millions of kids in other countries who don’t learn until later are proof of that. As long as the kindergarten kids are actively engaged (i.e. not bored) in something, what is gained by pushing reading at earlier ages?

@pentamom, yes. It depends on the kid. I’d say it even depends more on the kid than on the teacher or approach, by a large margin. You can have the best teacher with the best curriculum, and there will STILL be kids not ready to read at 5. On the other hand, you can have kids who are reading at 3 without any direct instruction from teachers or parents.

I have a good friend who is a bit of a helicopter mom, especially about school, and we will joke about her oldest and my youngest and their literacy skills. I will fully admit to be a bit lazy with my youngest, in terms of all the enrichment stuff. He doesn’t always get read to 20 minutes a day. I don’t appropriately limit his TV time. My main parenting accomplishment with him was figuring out that the best way to get him to stop eating the cat food was to put a pet bowl with Cheerios on the floor next to it, so that he could eat like an animal without actually ingesting pet food. And this kid, at 18 months, after watching Leap Frog’s Letter Factor 2 or 3 times, could identify every letter of the alphabet and give its letter sound. At 2-1/2, he can write nearly all of his letters (often more neatly than his 9 year old brother) and can sound out some CVC words. It’s like he just camne out with a brain wired for reading and writing, and I did very little to facilitate that. (And I’m guessing that, by 8 or 9, his reading skills will be much closer to that of his same-age peers than they are right now, because that’s what tends to happen with early readers.)

My friend reads to her kids 40 minutes a day, does phonics flashcards, has formal reading lessons, and her oldest, at 4, still didn’t know his letters and at 5 was still struggling with letter sounds. It didn’t click for him until he was 6, and he’s still not ready for reading yet (although he’s getting there). That’s still within the range of developmentally-normal, and is nothing to worry about.

Kids learn to read at different rates, just like they learn to talk at different rates. My oldest was speaking in full sentences before he was a year; my youngest barely said anything until he was 26 or 27 months. Both were within the range of normal. Children vary, a lot, developmentally, and it tends to all even out in a few years.

Donna, I don’t consider 5 “early” to introduce beginning reading skills. In my KG the entire class learned how to read (and nobody there was redshirted). All of my siblings and both of my kids were reading between age 3 and 5.

I do happen to be somewhat knowledgeable in literacy, by the way. I went to school to be a teacher for dyslexics, and while I did not end up pursuing this career, I have always been a literacy volunteer and was an officer for a literacy organization for years. It is something I have studied constantly since before I was a teen.

And no, I did not say there was never any reason to hold a kid back. You know I am not that stupid. In many parts of the country, including where I live, middle-class / well-off people whose kids have “summer birthdays” automatically redshirt them. To not redshirt is the exception in many circles I hang in. The teachers encourage it and the parents think they are doing their kids a favor by making sure school is ridiculously easy for them.

I do not believe that taking away the challenge of school is good for kids. It’s just another form of bubble wrapping. It makes for unnatural development. If a plant can’t grow upward, it’s going to grow some way. It’s not going to just sit there patiently waiting until the obstruction is removed. Kids won’t either. There’s truth to the saying that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. At best, even the most moral kid on the planet will learn how to spend her class time daydreaming instead of learning good work and study skills. Down the line, when it matters, she is going to be in for a rude awakening.

It is not a new idea. And there is research to support my views, though I have no intention of digging it up so I can cite it.

I also see it in my own kids. The one who has to work hard in school has much better study and organizational habits, and she can take her hits, get back up and keep trying. The other one is great at reading and remembering, but she won’t put in much effort; and when things don’t go as expected, she’s at a loss. I already accelerated her so there isn’t much more I can do, besides wait for the school to differentiate the work more. I can’t imagine either of my kids being in a lower grade. They would drive me and their teacher insane.

SKL – Under your theory, every person who went to kindergarten in Portland Maine in 1975 should be a bored underachiever because they made no attempt whatsoever to teach us to read in kindergarten so very few learned to do so, but that is obviously not reality. Even kids like me, who were very intelligent and easily could have learned, managed to still pull through in life. I don’t even remember being bored in kindergarten, despite not learning to read.

The fact is that regardless of when they learn to read, extremely bright kids are going to have issues in school with boredom. Schools are simply not equipped to handle advanced learners very well. Learning to read earlier may make kindergarten more challenging (although it shouldn’t if nobody is learning and they are all doing something else), but boredom still sets in eventually because you are always going to be ahead of the curriculum.

My daughter (who is not redshirted, but is a fall birthday so one of the oldest in her class) easily could have gone to kindergarten a year earlier. I see absolutely nothing that we would have gained except her graduating a year earlier. Her intelligence is what it is and will always be what it is regardless of her age of school entry and the date she learned to read. Most things are still going to come easy to her because she is smarter than average. She is still going to be bored much of the time because she picks up concepts very quickly.

I agree with the chorus of “don’t redshirt for no good reason.” I wasn’t redshirted, and I fell smack dab in the middle of the “correct” age range for kindergarten when I started school (my birthday is June 16th, and the cut-off date was December 31st), but I was academically ahead of the other kids for all of elementary school, because I’d been read to from a young age, and I started learning to read at three, because I wanted to learn–my mom says I started by reading road signs when I was in the car. Apparently, my first words were “Stop” and “Hospital.” Anyway, my parents had the opposite problem–they wanted to skip me ahead, because they thought I was ready for it, and they’d each skipped a grade in school themselves. However, the school system wouldn’t allow it, for “social and emotional reasons,” so instead, I stayed in my chronologically-appropriate grade, and got made fun of for being a “brainiac,” etc., and badgered into letting other kids copy my work on assignments and tests. Elementary school was the longest nine years of my life, but sometimes I wonder if it would have been different if I’d been allowed to skip a grade, and if so, which grade?

@Snow: Keep an eye on the messages that HSLDA sends out if you get on their mailing list. Half of the time you can go to the organization for good info on homeschool requirements and resources in your state, and the other half of the time they’re sending out highly colored press releases alluding to various conspiracies and movements trying to do this and that to The American Family. If you want to know the definition of The American Family being used, consider that the founder of HSLDA also founded Patrick Henry College.

The first place to start, IMO, is searching on homeschooling in your state, and also in your school district. You may just have to sign a declaration of intent and off you go, or you may basically have to run an itty bitty school with a foot of paperwork and laminated IDs and everything–or you may find out that your state has a happy medium allowing you to register your student through the local district and receive all school services and a voucher for books in return for a Peechee folder’s worth of reporting every year. The point is that your planning will largely be determined by what you find out about homeschooling in your state and district.

Then you need to think about how you want to do the teaching. Is unschooling possible and if so do you want to use that style? Or do you want to go for something more preassigned? Each alternative requires different preparation and follow-up. I don’t know about unschooling, but I have been homeschooling for five years now. Finding a method that you want to use (and aligning the reports you make with the requirements of your state) requires a lot of thought. Personally I homeschool partly because I don’t think children need to be provided with little bits of carefully diced and sequenced information, so I use Ambleside Online as my curriculum framework; it’s based on the assumption that children are able to synthesize information that is presented in context. Ambleside is also good for parents who think that children are pushed much too hard in school these days with far too much busywork besides (raises hand) and do much better with brief lessons.

I think you’re right about the time requirements for middle school. Three hours a day, plus possibly an hour or so of self-directed work (reading, research, etc.), should be plenty.

@ Michelle,

Applause from the gallery.
What a novel concept, um? Learning by observing – that kids actually happen to grow into readiness for cognitive reasoning.
“Hurry-up” learning is about as good for kids as “Just in time” supply is for the planet.
Good sense should be the mentor of the teacher.

The people around here who red shirt is almost always upper to middle class folks who either want their sons to be big for their grade to have an advantage in sports or to have an advantage in school with academics and behavior. They say this with their own mouths. They say they are redshirting years before the kids are even 5 to make that decision. They just know they are going to do it. It is considered some kind of look at me I have enough money to pay for staying home and daycare and preschool another year extra.

I am a stay at home parent who could have easily red shirted but I did not want to. I knew they were academically ready and even though mine are a little immature for their age and my son has special needs, I think holding them back is stupid. Every kid is their own person and will develop in their own way. I don’t care about the race to nowhere. I don’t care if my kid is the smartest (one son actually is in his class), the biggest, the most perfect, the best athlete, etc. I don’t care. I rage against this my kid is better than your kid mentality most people around here have.

@Donna–I’m not sure I would have been made fun of if I’d been skipped ahead, because I was also better behaved than a lot of my same-age classmates, and one of the things that annoyed me was the noise, fighting and arguing, and generally immature behaviour that they’d engage in, and of course, if I didn’t participate, I got teased about that. Also, what if I’d skipped kindergarten, and started grade one at age five? That way, just like redshirting, it would have happened from day one, so it could have been kept quiet, and there wouldn’t have been any big fanfare about “Emily skipped a grade, what a brain.” I mean, I’m not bitter about it or anything, and I enjoyed high school and university, but still, considering how many times I had to slog through the same lessons in long division, or French, or how to draw perspective, or whatever, I’ve thought on many occasions that, if I had gotten to do elementary school (K-8 here) at my own pace, I probably could have finished it in four or five years instead of nine.

I don’t see bullying being any worse than average for smart kids who were accelerated. I was accelerated a year, but I didn’t know it until 7th grade. When the teacher said the youngest student got to play Santa at the Christmas party, that is when it came out that I was a little too young for 7th grade. Because I was quiet, I’m not sure anyone even realized I was smart. There were enough things that I didn’t know / do well. I remember how incredulous everyone was when I didn’t know what “shortstop” meant in 5th grade. 😛 We didn’t ever share grade info and I kept a low profile.

Being very introverted and non-conformist, I did get picked on some, and I was bullied for a while in 8th grade (by a small group of people). But lots of kids of all ages and IQ levels get picked on / bullied.

I graduated high school in 3 years, so I turned 16 in my graduating year. I was surprised to find that I felt more comfortable and accepted in the senior class than the junior class. People were much more interested in what I had to contribute. Group work was much more synergistic. I was never marginalized. I can only wonder whether I would have had a happier school career had I been accelerated 2 years from early on. But that hardly ever happens.

Unfortunately nobody really knows how life would have turned out had a different path been taken.

I think people are a bit overly optimistic about how well grade-skipping turns out for accelerated kids, just like we are overly optimistic about how well grade-retention works out for kids who are behind. While common sense would lead us to believe that, if you are behind, repeating a grade is the answer, or that if you are ahead, skipping a grade is the answer, I haven’t seen any research indicating that either is the case. Kids who are held back tend to ultimately have worse school performance and more social problems than kids performing at the same level who are not retained, and I’ve never seen anything indicating that accelerated kids don’t suffer from boredom and social problems at the same rates as kids who aren’t skipped ahead.

The thing is, most accelerated learners just learn faster. They pick up concepts faster than their classmates. It’s not a matter of the material being too easy–that they are bored in fourth grade but the pace of a fifth or sixth grade class would be just right for them–but of the pace being too slow, and that’s going to be the case in the grade they are accelerated into. It’s not like an advanced third grader is intellectually the same as an average fourth or fifth grader, but that they just learn material faster. Unless you are going to be skipping a child so far ahead that they lack the basic skills they need to grasp the material–in which case social factors will no doubt be a huge issue–you are not really solving the problem.

I’m not sure that most public schools are the best place for really academically advanced kids. Some schools have great programs, but most don’t. Part of the reason I homeschool my oldest is because of that issue. I know that moving him into a fifth or sixth grade classroom would not have been the answer. It wasn’t that, for example, he learned nothing new in fourth grade math: he actually was introduced to a number of new concepts. But, the problem was that he picked those concepts up much faster than his peers. He would have them down in half a class period, while many of his peers needed a week to learn the same concepts. Moving him into a fifth grade math classroom would not have solved that, because he’d have missed fourth-grade concepts he needed to know, but once he got caught up on those, he’d be in the same situation: he’d be introduced to new math concepts that he’d be able to pick up in a class period or so, while his peers needed a week. His issue was more the pace, not the content, and acceleration doesn’t solve that.

The benefit of homeschooling, for us, is that instead of just saying, “We are jumping him from fourth grade to sixth grade but spending a year on sixth grade material,” we can tailor everything to where he is. If he can move through fifth grade math in four months, he can. If he gets through fifth grade science in six months, he can.

I don’t think homeschooling is the only option, but I do think that traditional public school settings are not particularly well-suited for students who are working either struggling or advanced, and unfortunately neither retention nor acceleration tends to address the real needs of the student.

@JP, yes, that’s basically it. I think we are failing to teach students how to learn. I realize that “teaching how to learn” might sound kind of trite, but if students aren’t learning to be attentive and independent readers and listeners–which, as far as I can tell from my experience both as a parent and as a teacher, they aren’t–how much good will all that content knowledge serve them? As far as I can tell, basic skills (being able to read and write and to perform basic math functions) and knowing how to learn are by far the most important things we can teach kids.

I remember very little–if anything!–from high school chemistry or high school geography or college Latin. But, I know how to read and listen to learn, so if I do need to know something about chemistry or geography or Latin, I know how to do it. I think our educational system is so based right now on cramming kids full of knowledge and then testing them on it (and not really caring how much is retained after the test) that we’re not stepping back and seeing the big picture, that in many cases it’s not the content of learning but the process that is so important. If kids don’t learn how to learn independently, they are going to be at a huge disadvantage as adults.

@Donna–I should have clarified; my parents kind of knew I was ahead before I started school. So, I’m not exactly certain when the “Should Emily skip a grade?” conversation arose, but I’m pretty sure that it happened early on in my academic career; early enough that I wouldn’t have been teased for it. Anyway, maybe it’s true that skipping ahead, but still going at the “average” pace wouldn’t have been a solution–that was a good point. The worst class I remember was French, because we’d read interesting stories as a class–for example, one was about a family of pioneers–BUT, we’d go just one page per day, and we’d have an assignment based on that page (which was always too easy for me), and I kept getting in trouble for reading ahead. We were also taught the same material year after year–so, there were always the same units on greetings and conversation, parts of the body and clothing, rooms in the house, buildings, vehicles, and professions, and so on, and so forth. I’ve always found languages interesting, but public school pretty much ruined French for me. I liked it again in high school, because the classes moved a bit more quickly, and I felt more challenged, but elementary school French was pure hell. In fact, pretty much all of grades 4 through 8 was hell for me, between the boredom and the bullying. By grade eight, my teachers had pretty much given up on me, so I’d finish my work early, and then go across the hall to the computer room to play Duke Nukem. I enjoyed it then, but looking back, I have to wonder, how much could I have learned if I’d actually been engaged and encouraged to learn, rather than just being brushed aside as an inconvenience?

I found this years ago, so I don’t remember the exact text, but I think it provides info on research showing that acceleration is the right answer for many above-average kids.

Obviously there is no one right answer. But the option to accelerate should be just as available as the option to hold back.

http://www.accelerationinstitute.org/nation_deceived/nd_v1.pdf

anonymous mom, I never said acceleration was a cure-all, I said it was not. But for many advanced kids, it is better than doing nothing.

I also had a kid who at KG age was reading 5th+ grade books for fun. The question “what would you do” is not a hypothetical one for me. I did what I could. At least with slightly older kids she has a few classmates who are also advanced readers, who would understand her higher level thinking, who have intriguing things to talk about themselves. She has access to more books of interest to her. A higher % of math, science, etc. taught is actually new to her. It is sometimes worth volunteering to answer a tough question posed by the teacher. Is it enough to make everything perfect, of course not. Is it better than the grade below, of course it is.

There’s no classroom in any local school that could meet this kid’s needs. You don’t need to tell me that. So I don’t understand what the argument is about. Are you saying my kid should be in 1st grade because 2nd grade is not very challenging for her? Or are you saying that homeschooling is the only option better than leaving her in 1st? Or … ?

I’m not saying that children are better in 1st than 2nd grade or that homeschooling is the only option. If a child is happy and doing well after being skipped ahead a year, that’s great. I tend to think they probably also would have managed to be happy and well-adjusted if they hadn’t skipped, but it might be a better fit. For well-behaved, well-liked students who are academically advanced, moving up one grade might be a good fit.

But if a child is bored and bullied and miserable, it’s unlikely that the situation would be remedied if they were just moved up a grade or two. They’d likely continue to be bored, bullied, and miserable, and those are the issues that need to be addressed. Similarly, for a child like my son, who is academically advanced but lacks behavioral self-control and isn’t very good at obeying, moving ahead a grade or two would probably just place them into a situation where the behavioral expectations would exceed their capabilities and make things worse.

And, mainly, I don’t think parents are somehow harming their children by waiting until they are 6 to start kindergarten, even if the child is quite smart. With kindergarten being increasingly academic–and now nearly always full-day–there are plenty of reasons for parents to think that waiting until 6 is a good idea. I had never heard of “red-shirting” before this thread, and the only families I know who postponed kindergarten were hippie/crunchy types who didn’t believe in placing children into academic environments too young.

My son could easily skip to second grade from 1st. He is bored now and I think that is why he gets in trouble a lot. I am going to try to get him tested for gifted next year which might help. But I would never skip him a grade because then those freaking kids would be 4 years older than him!

Donna, we’re going to have to agree to disagree. I’ve already been repeating myself too much here.

Snow, socialization for homeschoolers is exactly the opposite of what non-homeschoolers think it is. Homeschoolers end up doing plays, volunteering, playing sports, doing scouts, taking art, karate, gymnastics, and swim classes. And we parents are run ragged because we are taking our kids everywhere and wondering when we will fit some school in!

Best wishes to you and your son as you embark on this journey!

Emily –

Schools vary on ability and willingness to cater to advanced learners. My elementary school was heavily tracked so I was in class with the 25 smartest kids in the grade every year and everything was accelerated. And the gifted program was FABULOUS. I remember writing, directing and preforming our own play and going on several killer field trips, including one to Washington DC where we had a lengthy question and answer session with John Glenn.

Sadly, tracking fell out of favor many years ago and most public schools don’t have the funding to take the field trips we did anymore. My daughter’s school does a fairly decent job at providing advanced learning opportunities, at least in reading and math. Outside of some bureaucratic issues, I’m pretty happy with it and she is extremely happy with it. In fact, they were apparently telling some weird gun joke that I didn’t get at all that involved making guns with fingers and saying the word gun and talking about shooting the President today and nobody was suspended. I only know about it because my daughter told me the joke (and I use that term extremely loosely) and mentioned that her classmate told it to the teacher.

“There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes.” GK Chesterton

@Snow, I kept meaning to jump in here and say, I agree that it sounds like you are all set, socially. I am not a member of any homeschooling groups. They all meet in the suburbs, and I don’t feel like driving thirty or forty minutes to hang out with people I may not like anyway. 😉 We are fortunate to live in a neighborhood with a number of families, and my son has lots of neighborhood friends. None of them went to the school he’d been attending. Honestly, he gets more real social time now than he did in school, simply because, without homework (most of his friends are either homeschooled or attend a school that gets out at 2:30 with no homework), he is ready to go out and play by 3, instead of getting home from school at 4, having homework to do, and having almost no time to play before dinner.

I’ll be honest and say we are not those “out of the house all the time” homeschoolers. During the day, we are mostly at home (or in our yard, or at the branch library a few blocks from our house). But, I don’t think my kids are lacking for social experiences at all. Normally, we make some sort of trip out around 11 or so, where they play with each other or we visit the library or we take a walk until lunch (and once a week we visit a neighborhood cafe and usually run into people we know), and then the kids go out again at 3, and nearly every day I have to shoo three or four of their friends away around 5:00 when they come in to get ready for dinner.

I know a lot of homeschoolers who love activities and field trips and groups, and that’s great, but that is just not me and wouldn’t work for our family right now. I think that if your son has neighborhood friends, he should be just fine even if you don’t plan any social events for him.

Thanks again. I got a ton more info today and I’m really looking forward to homeschooling now. My son will have to take a standardized test every year, but other than that it looks like we’ll be pretty free. I also found some art classes that we can do together and that makes me very happy. 🙂 Next year is going to be the best school year ever.