How did you decide how and when to accelerate your child?

[athena1277]

My youngest is giving me a lot to think about in terms of pacing for school.  She’s 6yo and in 1st grade.  However, she taught herself how to read just after turning 4.  She could add and subtract with ease before kindergarten.  I skipped K math last year and started her in 1st grade MM, but at a slower pace, so we covered half in K and will do the other half in 1st.  When we do our Bible lesson, she wants to read the passage instead of me, and does so with ease (NASB or NKJ, not a kid’s version).  She could easily do 2nd grade or higher work, except for physically writing anything.  Handwriting is very much at a 6yo level.

I don’t want to push her too hard right now because she likes school and I don’t think elementary should be very stressful.  I’ve started thinking about how and when I can move her along without too much difficulty, especially about skipping a grade.  How do you decide when to do that?  What factors do I need to consider?

[HomeAgain]

I didn't decide.  I just threw things at the wall and saw what stuck.  My youngest had handwriting issues, too, so I kept lots of work hands on, relevant, and covering things he was interested in.  As he grew, his work naturally changed to be more written.  Keeping it physically at his level, though, allowed us to go deeper, harder, and further in when he was interested.

We didn't consider "skipping a grade" as we homeschooled.  I just said "this is 4th year" "this is 5th year"..and so on.  Whatever resources we used didn't matter.  It was especially helpful because there was a lot of covering more than 1 year's worth of material in one year.  We did 180 days-ish, stopped, then did more the next year.

[wendyroo]

Very similar answer to HomeAgain.

This year I will have an 8th grader taking Pre-Calculus. He never "skipped a grade", we just kept moving at his pace, and never let his pencil aversion slow him down.

We used Math Mammoth all the way through. We skipped a lot...but never whole levels. We would skip the review chapter at the beginning of every level (we school year round, so there was no reason to review after a summer off), we skipped about half of all regular problems (but did all of the word problems), we skipped almost all of the time and measurement sections because he fully understood them with only casual introductions in real life, we skipped any sections that he had clearly already mastered, etc.

That is not to say that we skipped all of that so we could speed ahead. I was very aware of what Richard Rusczyk calls The Calculus Trap. So we took the time to go wide and deep. Every day he did "math" (Math Mammoth, which he almost never struggled with) and "problem solving" which really made him think and often introduced concepts that he would see down the road in Math Mammoth.

All of my kiddos are similarily accelerated across most of their subjects. Not because we pushed or skipped, but just because I kept moving them along to new things that they found interesting and challenging.

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I don’t think elementary should be very stressful

I did want to comment on this. I agree completely that elementary shouldn't be stressful, but I don't agree that giving a child appropriately challenging work necessarily causes stress. Or, alternatively, if my kids show signs of stress when they are challenged (and my kids all have diagnosed anxiety, so stress is a frequent companion), I lean into that and help them process and learn to cope rather than dialing back the challenge to eliminate the stress. Obviously, this is within reason, if it really seems like a child is not ready for something academically or emotionally then I will put it on the back burner, but I never choose what to cover assuming that higher academic level will automatically lead to higher stress level.

[desertflower]

I didn't skip a year.  We just went through the books really fast.  He didn't need to do as many problems that was presented in the book.  I needed to learn how to not have him do all of the problems on the page too! 

For math, Beast Academy works well for some accelerated learners. 

[The Governess]

We didn’t technically skip a year, but dd finished high school a year early. Her transcript shows 3 years of high school instead of four, plus some credits from middle school.

She started taking some high school level classes in 7th and took 2 classes at our community college per semester from 9th grade up until she graduated. 

[Clarita]

FWIW because my son doesn't turn 6 for a few months, I don't skip anything even if I know or think he knows the stuff. We just do it quicker because he can and we skip activities or quickly do problem sets verbally if he requests.

I don't skip because when I do his phonics with him it's clear there are some words that he can read/infer when reading in context, but he has more difficulty reading them when they are stand alone.

[8filltheheart]

I have never "accelerated" my kids or had them skip grades.  They just accelerate themselves by doing what they do in the same amt of time as any avg child.  We don't allow our kids to graduate high school early, so grade designation is completely irrelevant.  I have had kids graduate from high school having completed almost the equivalent of minors in math and physics or ready for 400 level foreign language classes.  When they were little, they spent very little time doing school.  My rule of thumb is about an hr per grade level for k-5th, 6th-8th is anywhere from 6-8 hrs per day (really depends on the child and what all they are doing), high school is around 7-9hrs per day (again, really depends on the student.)

I have never given my advanced kids more work.  The work they do is simply at their level and presents no more challenge to them personally than an avg course for an avg student.  My current 7th grader is taking geometry and Russian.  Those are no different for her than if she were an avg child taking pre-alg and no foreign language at all.

[Brittany1116]

When I brought my older boy home after Kindergarten, I chose 2nd grade work for him because that is what level the publishers I liked started at, or what he placed into. At 5, he read fluently, was a natural speller, and did basic multiplication. We didn't do every subject, I didn't work him for hours, and I didn't make him write more than what was appropriate for his hand stamina. We just kept plugging along and decided this year he has effectively skipped a grade. He is 6th on paper doing 7th grade English and 8th grade history according to publisher, finishing Algebra 1, and doing other middle school level science and reading etc. At this point, it is more that he only has about a year left with our chosen curriculum and is already earning high school credits. I am aware I could keep calling him 6th and give him another 6 years but we don't feel it's necessary. If we hit some roadblock and have to slow down, that's fine. At the moment, I plan as if he is in 7th grade. 

[EKS]

We just went at a speed that worked.

Note that in math, I've found that it is better to go as quickly as they need to early on so that you have extra time for the harder stuff down the road.  

[regentrude]

I did not "decide to accelerate". My kids learned at the level they were capable of, at the pace that was right for them, with the materials they were ready for, with the level of challenge they needed. In a homeschool, grade labels make no sense. 
Grade levels only matter in late highschool, when you have to decide which year is 11th grade because of the PSAT and the college applications. We retroactively re-labeled DD's 8th grade her 9th grade when it was clear that she was better served by graduating at 17 and attending university than by continuing to homeschool with DE at the local 4 year uni. 

[Clemsondana]

There are lots of ways to think about how you educate your student.  Some might decide that they want to complete the on-grade-level math book each year, and their kid only takes part of the year to do it and they move on to doing other things.  Many of us take the approach that we'll do around 30 minutes, or an hour, of math each day (depending on the age of the child) or spend X amount of time reading about history.  Some kids can cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time, so they move more quickly.  With my older, we did a placement test for Singapore Math in K, and kid placed into second grade.  Doing 30 minutes each day and skipping unneeded repetition, kid finished 2nd and 3rd grade Singapore that year.  When kid worked on AoPS pre-A in 5th, kid hit a wall with frustration tolerance and attention to detail.  So, we went in various directions for a while.  We did very low output for science, history, and language arts in elementary because it would have been frustrating for this kid.  But, kid was reading and absorbing tons of information.  From a content perspective, kid was crazy accelerated and often read and thought on a high school level.  On a 'write a report' scale, kid was years behind...until we started working on it in 5th, and kid was writing coherent essays by the end of the year.  For us, it's been much less about deciding to accelerate and more about teaching both of our students what they need to learn at an age where they can learn it with an appropriate level of challenge - neither too easy nor overwhelming.  

[Malam]

On 8/16/2022 at 4:43 PM, wendyroo said:

and never let his pencil aversion slow him down.

I always saw MM as quite pencil-heavy. Did you scribe for him, use a dry-erase board, or listed for verbal answers?

On 8/16/2022 at 3:13 PM, HomeAgain said:

Keeping it physically at his level, though, allowed us to go deeper, harder, and further in when he was interested

How did limiting pencilwork allow you to go further into what he was interested? Less time writing out assignments?

Edited August 18, 2022 by Malam

[wendyroo]

3 minutes ago, Malam said:

I always saw MM as quite pencil-heavy. Did you scribe for him, use a dry-erase board, or listed for verbal answers?

All of the above.

He started MM as a young 5 year old. Sometimes I scribed for him or just had him do the problems orally; other times I gave him number stickers/magnets/stamps that he used to answer.

Later, we still scribed and did problems orally, but we also added in the white board as an option. 

We also drastically cut how many problems he was doing per lesson. He only did about half of the straight arithmetic problems in a lesson, plus all of the word problems and puzzle corners.

[HomeAgain]

5 minutes ago, Malam said:

 

How did limiting pencilwork allow you to go further into what he was interested? Less time writing out assignments?

I used alternate work.

For example, spelling was often done with tiles.  Grammar used physical symbols, then colored pencils, then diagramming.  Math was visual, oral, and kinetic, writing only when necessary.  His 5th grade written math book had about 45 pages total for the year.  Before that he kept 1cm graphing notebooks.  Even logic had cut out paper "red herrings" and "tu quoque" fingers.  I didn't need him to write across the curriculum every day, even if that's what the program was designed for.  I needed him to interact with the material so he could complete the 3 steps of learning (say it, show it, teach it back) and Socratic discussion work.

When he wasn't held back by what he could write, he could produce better understanding and get more into the material.

[Malam]

1 minute ago, HomeAgain said:

Even logic had cut out paper "red herrings" and "tu quoque" fingers

That sounds fun! Which curriculum was that?

[HomeAgain]

1 hour ago, Malam said:

That sounds fun! Which curriculum was that?

That was during Fallacy Detective.  The book has questions at the end of each chapter that we used them with, but we extended the activities by also looking for the same fallacies in everyday occurrences - politicians, Facebook, opinion articles...having the visual up on the wall helped him remember and keep them all in mind.

[Dmmetler]

We went content wise as needed. Mostly Do the next thing. That meant starting AoPS at age 7-8 (BA wasn't out yet. I'm guessing it would have slowed things a bit). Lots of scribing, lots of doing stuff orally vs on paper, and really pushing typing early in other subjects. We accelerated by grade level, on paper, when my kid needed it-which, honestly, was more for social reasons than academic ones. Hitting middle school ages changed things a lot.