Can you skip grades in middle school

If it is found that your child appears ready to be promoted to the next grade level, further testing will take place. Gifted testing will determine if the child is at an advanced level compared to other students of the same age. This type of testing is not conducted with all students. You will probably be asked to attend a meeting with school personnel counselors, administrators, gifted teachers to discuss your child's abilities and give permission for the testing.

Some students are anxious about finishing school and are ready to move to the next level, especially if they have not been challenged. However, other students are content with their educational ease and current environment. Middle school students are mature enough to begin having some opinion in their education.

A telescoping curriculum is a great option for a family with a crazy schedule. This tends to be hard to pull off in large public schools, many of which lack the resources and funding to dedicate this much time to one student.

This gives the student more flexibility in completing the work at a pace that works for them. Students must be able to keep themselves motivated and working since there tends to be less direct adult oversight with a telescoping curriculum than there is in a conventional school setting.

It is possible to skip a grade in middle school, but it is considerably less common and much more complicated than skipping a lower grade. There are several factors that play into the choice of if skipping a grade in middle school is the right choice for your student, with lots of pros and cons to weigh out.

While skipping a grade may seem like the most obvious choice to enhance your education, middle schools and high schools often make it much easier than elementary schools to have a more personalized experience. One of the simplest ways to create a more engaging educational schedule is to talk to your school about what is possible.

The ability to create a custom schedule allows for much more flexibility throughout middle school and high school than you likely had in elementary school. For example, you could stick with your grade level for math and science but take English with the grade above you.

You could pick up an extra language over the summer and test into a higher-level language class in the fall. Most schools offer a good amount of elective choices that can help you create a more customized feeling schedule. Another way to accelerate your grade is to take online courses to supplement your in-person schooling. Many states even have a statewide online school option that is subsidized by the state, making this a great option if you want to push yourself.

The requirements to skip any grade vary based on age, state restrictions, and school. Before you even worry about how to skip a grade in middle school, make sure you check the requirements and regulations for your specific state. These rules can also vary depending on the type of school that your student attends. The rules for a homeschool student looking to skip a grade are different than that of a public school or private school student looking to skip a grade.

One option that can be helpful when trying to skip a grade in middle school or any higher grade is to think about combining or switching the type of schooling.

We talked about telescoping curriculums earlier in the article, but it is worth mentioning again. While it may be easy to leave kindergarten one spring and start second grade the next fall, there is a lot more work to cleanly skip a full grade in one go in middle school.

For this reason, utilizing everything that a telescoping curriculum has to offer may be the best and most manageable way to skip a grade in middle school. This means finding ways to accelerate the courses that you are taking. For example, maybe you opt to take math independently and do one course in the fall and one course in the spring. This sort of independently paced curriculum allows you to get through multiple years of a subject in just one school year.

This is a great place to incorporate classes at a local community college or an online school into your course schedule. This will give you more freedom when you take what class. One reason for the shift away from grade skipping is concern about potential social problems for kids like Ken Newman, who are advanced academically, but not physically or emotionally.

Many educators feel that keeping a child with her age group is the safest way to go. Why hurry kids any more than you need to? Those on the other side of the debate see a larger danger in letting kids languish in classes that are far too easy for them. For parents of gifted children, the wide range of views on the plusses and minuses of grade skipping can be confusing.

Is skipping a grade a good option for high-ability students? And if not, are there better alternatives? Maureen Marron spends a lot of time thinking about how schools can meet the needs of high-ability students. An associate research scientist at the Connie Belin and Jacqueline N. For one student, that may mean grade skipping; for another, it may mean acceleration in a single subject, like math; for other students, enrichment-based activities in the classroom are all they need.

But Marron and her colleagues at the Belin-Blank Center say there are far too few acceleration opportunities for children in the U. The fallout? When children are accelerated a full grade they often miss a few skills that are taught during the grade skipped. This leads to more than just the standard increase in work from one school year to another.

There is often extra work resulting from the skipped material. Does your child naturally gravitate to children that are older than themselves?

Are their friends more often in the grade ahead rather than the grade your child is in? Many parents who consider grade acceleration wonder if their child will fit in among their new peers.

Children and teens are very aware of differences between students. While today's schools work hard to develop friendly social climates, you will want to consider how well your child will get along with their new peers. If your child naturally gravitates towards children in higher grades, you can feel confident that they will fit in well in their new grade.

You may wonder if you should accelerate now or wait until your child is older. Some parents worry that accelerating their child in earlier grades will lead to their child not fitting in when they reach puberty or have growth spurts later than their peers. The Acceleration Institute with the University of Iowa claims that earlier grade accelerations are often easier on children than accelerating later on in the academic career.

Schools divide children into age-based grade levels because educational research shows that most children learn best in a classroom with same-age peers. Within a classroom, teachers use what are known as differentiation strategies to vary work according to the various needs of individual students.

If your child is bright, motivated, or even one of the older students in their grade, their grade level is still likely to be developmentally appropriate fit. It is when a child's development is significantly ahead of the timeline of their grade level peers that full grade acceleration can be of great benefit.

The use of a valid instrument such as the Iowa Acceleration Scale can help provide an objective view of how well your child's development and traits match those of students who benefitted from full grade acceleration.

These tools are not like ordinary tests. They are more of a survey in which parents and teachers compare what they know about a student to factors that researchers have found relate to successful acceleration. These tools can also provide guidance on the importance of different factors, so you will know just how important physical skills or IQ are for acceleration.

The result is a score on a scale indicating how likely acceleration is to be a successful intervention for your child. If you decide that grade acceleration is right for your child, speak with your child's school to find out what steps you will need to take. According to a review by Northwestern University researchers of over years of research on placing children in groups by their ability, children who fit the above guidelines for acceleration do benefit from being skipped a grade.

What this means for parents is that you will want to be prepared with the reasons why you believe your child will benefit from acceleration. Include both personal stories, such as information about being accepted by older peers, along with the results of any assessments, such as standardized test scores or IQ test results.