9/25/2023 0 Comments Delaying kindergarten until age 6My children, who are in first and fourth grade, attend a small and well-regarded public elementary school. I live in a city where schools have been fully remote since the beginning of the pandemic. Given that your son is close to the cutoff date, holding him back may not have the negative impact that I’d normally worry about. COVID has created this black hole-we don’t yet know how it will impact the next few years of school (or beyond). That being said, your case is one of the few where I see some benefit to holding him back. Generally, I err on the side of “don’t redshirt your child.” The benefits of redshirting are overstated by its proponents, and a child who is a year ahead of his peers and bored may enjoy school less. If we wait, we’d pursue various social activities for him in the meantime, depending on the COVID situation at the time. Some of the traditional reasons to redshirt, like to confer a sports or academic advantage, have zero influence for us. People I’ve spoken with in our school district don’t seem to have a strong opinion. I’ve met a few retired kindergarten teachers who’ve all unequivocally advised to hold him back, but they’re from an older generation. He’s had very little social interaction with other children since March 2020. We don’t push him or do any formal lessons. He was in preschool as a 3-year-old, until COVID shut things down, and he’s been home with me since. He has good fine motor control and makes detailed drawings, usually with little guidance. He has a huge vocabulary and likes to be read to for hours. He’s currently 4 and a half years old, knows the alphabet, spells, and writes some simple words, counts to 100, and grasps simple addition and subtraction. Notably, he is physically quite slight for his age. He turns 5 late next summer, shortly before the kindergarten age cutoff. ![]() We’re trying to decide whether to start our child in kindergarten at age 5 or 6. Have a question for our teachers? Email or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group. In addition to our traditional advice, every Thursday we feature an assortment of teachers from across the country answering your education questions. Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column.
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