Kindergarten over 2 years?

Don’t know how much this will help but I faced a similar dilemma with my oldest who is now 7. Her birthday is August 15 and while she was ready academically for 1st grade last year, I kept her back.

Why? Partly because 99% of people I respected advised me to keep her back. Partly because I wanted to spend more time last year on field trips and adventures and playing outside than academics. Partly because I didn’t want her to graduate and go to college too early (I have friends graduating their kids at 16/17 and having them do a gap year because they aren’t developmentally ready for college.) And partly because my birthday is August 31st and I went to a private school and attended church and almost always preferred to socialize with the class below me.

It was a hard decision to make and pray through and 2 things helped us finally decide. It didn’t matter for homeschooling in our state. Only for church. Anyway, (1) Our children’s director at church stopped me and said that it didn’t matter at all now whether she was in kindergarten or 1st grade but that her age would matter when she got to 5th grade and that we wouldn’t want her too young when she entered the middle school program. Then she advised us to hold my daughter back based on that. Then (2) the kindergarten class moved upstairs to the 1st grade over the summer and my daughter refused to stay. The format was lecture and then discussion questions. My daughter just wasn’t ready for that.

So we kept her back in kindergarten for a 2nd year at church last year and let her do arts and crafts and children’s church. And at home I called her “pre-1st”. And for her academics, we just kept on keeping on. If we finished the kindergarten materials, we went on to the 1st grade materials. I don’t regret our decision.

Good luck with your decision. I don’t really think there is a “right” answer and that’s what makes it so hard.

My youngest will be 7 in November and we are still doing MFW grade K.

I actually called the company about it because part of me just wanted to move on to first grade but they suggested we do a faster version (2 letters/week) of K until Christmas and reevaluate then.

I do not tell people who do not homeschool about this as I don’t think they would understand. I have to say I get anxious sometimes that we will be stuck in K forever but that is probably unlikely!! 😉

I look at it this way:

Finland, the country with the one of the best academic standings in the world, does not even remotely start learning until age 7.

Waldorf education, does not start learning until age 7.

100-200 years ago, most children that attended school only received 4-6 years of formal education, and their vocabulary, grammar and writing skills far surpass our own today.

Charlotte Mason herself, does not recommend starting academics until age 6 (so not even this year!)

If you want to look back at the history of education starting at the  Medieval age, clear back to the Greek and Roman beginnings of education, it was approached much differently in the classical world: a child learned the art of grammar, logic and rhetoric first, and then the work in the sciences (including math) did not start until they were much older, into their teens.

Over the thousands of years of history of education, it has always traditionally started later and/or lasted less time – and I would say, produced better results. Many of our greatest academics, thinkers, inventors and innovators have come from an era of delayed academics and/or less academics: Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Abe Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Johannes Kepler and this is just a tiny fraction of them.

While, I would tell you it really doesn’t matter what people think or say, because it’s your job to do what you feel in your heart is best for your child, you could always tell them to look at history, other countries, and to learn about other educational models.

So, for starters, I would say – don’t even feel you need to do MFW this year! Feel free to give her another year of just play and cuddling in your lap reading stories. Put MFW off until next year. However, if you want to continue it, then by all means, feel free to spread it out over two years. Perhaps just do it 2-3 days a week.

Really, the most important things we can teach a child before the ages of 6 are to enjoy reading (a far different skill than learning how to read), to observe (focus on Nature Study, teach them to pay attention and observe the world around them), and of course to be obedient and love the Lord. If we can teach a young child those things in the early years, then we have laid an excellent future for when academics start.

You have had some great advice. My addition is simply this. Homeschooling is so very different from public school that grades are irrelevant. We say that my kids are ‘in’ the same grade as their same-age peers at church (their main social group.) Then, we do whatever is appropriate for their education at whatever pace works for them. The only subject we do that even has any type of level attached to it is math, and only because it is generally sequential. Any other subject can be done in any order, so grades are meaningless.

So, for example, in “Kindergarten” my oldest daughter was reading things like The Chronicles of Narnia independently and doing math that was considered grade 2, because that’s what she was ready for. For “Kindergarten” my son, 2 years younger, did basically everything his older sister did for her ‘Grade 2’ year, because they are inseparable and do everything together and he just soaks up learning. However, my youngest daughter’s “Kindergarten” was lots of playing, voluntarily copying words from books (because the older siblings did copywork) even though she couldn’t read a word, and listening to read-aloud books much more advanced than most kids her age, because she listened to books that the other children were ready for.

Do what is appropriate for the child, label it whatever grade makes sense for their age, and ignore anyone who has a problem with that.