What are the pros and cons of having an advanced student skip a mid-elementary grade?
At the end of third grade, our daughter's teacher approached us (and our school's principal) and suggested that with her test scores (high-school level) and level academic mastery, we should put her in a private school with a gifted and talented program (our public school system has, for I think good reasons, done away with that), or else have her skip a grade. She felt like our daughter's level was such that differentiation within the fourth-grade classroom wouldn't be sufficient.
We aren't really interested in private school, and were a little concerned about social issues, and eventually a deciding factor was that the ELA curriculum for fourth grade focuses on writing and composition — an area that's always been one of our daughter's rough spots. So, with the help of the principal and teachers, we came up with a plan where she divides her time between 4th grade (homeroom, ELA) and 5th (math).
This has worked reasonably well (she's continued to excel at math and has really caught up in the writing skills), but had some problems as well — the daily classroom switch was stressful, and since our state has mandatory testing, that was done at the 4th grade level for all subjects (she did just fine, but again, it was a stressor). So now, as this year comes to a close, we're evaluating what to do next year — whether to continue the split pattern, to move her entirely into 6th, or even to stay in 5th and work with the math teacher on more advanced / in-depth education this year. (The principal has indicated that all of these are options).
I've read What are the pros and cons of having an advanced student skip Kindergarten?, and found the answers helpful in general, but I think the situation at the start of the school system is different from that at later grades — see for example this answer.
I recognize (and again see the prior question) that social groupings might be a factor, but in our case, our daughter really only has a few close friends in her grade (and we'll continue to be friends with those families anyway), and already has friends in the higher grade as well (from the math class, and just from the neighborhood).
What are other factors we might consider, and particularly, ones that might be especially important at this grade level?
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I was an advanced student, particularly in math, and I ended up in 6th grade working on my own from a 7th grade text, pretty much teaching myself. Once I hit high school, it was very easy to take upper level math (though I ran through all the available math classes at my school by end of junior year). The point of my experience here is that there are ways to be stimulated mathematically (and probably a lot more ways now than there were when I was in school) without skipping grades.
The downside to skipping grades is what happens when you want to send your 17-year-old high school graduate off to college. I have a friend who went at 16, and she describes herself as being woefully immature as a freshman in classes with kids who were sometimes 4-5 years older than she was.
As a 4th grade teacher, I found youngest students in class often struggled socially. I had one parent who ended up moving her child to another school and making him repeat a grade (despite his good grades), because he just didn't fit in as well as he should. There is a big maturity shift that happens from 4-9th grade (each grade is more mature than the previous), which seems to even out a little through high school. As a parent, I watched another large shift in maturity in the last year of high school.
A year and a half later, I want to report back: for our child and our school, this was absolutely the right move. We were already confident that academics would be no problem, and that was true. We were, however, worried about the social situation, and I'm very relieved to say that this turned out fine. Our daughter is far happier than she ever was, and in addition to the few friends she already had in the higher grade, she's making new ones — something she's always strugged with. In short, A++++, would do again.
I'm in the UK. Its a different system, but here is a cautionary tale:
Someone I know was moved up a year in Primary school, but when he reached the end of Primary the Secondary school refused to accept him. He was forced to say goodbye to his classmates and redo the whole last year of Primary school.
Make sure this isn't going to happen to your child.
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