illza

Much of the research states otherwise. While there are certainly instances of your anecdote that do occur, the rule seems to be that higher achieving students function better with those at their level than with those beneath them. And, even then, the problem is temporary. The majority of those accelerated kids, when interviewed as adults indicated that they wish they had been accelerated soon or more, and that any social issues were temporary and fleeting.

How many nba players do you think spent years working on layups and nothing else? The push themselves. They work on what they're not good at yet, and in doing that, improve at the things they already are.

Spending years going to classes that do nothing but teach you things you have already mastered is not practice. It's torture. To improve retention and mastery you keep using the skills you've attained to greater effect. The compounding is what matters. Move too slowly and people shut down, tune out, and ignore the material. That's when material is forgotten.

I've never understood the reasoning that administration and teachers put forth that the smart and "gifted" need to set an example for the other kids. A student is at school to be taught, not to set an example and teach the other kids. Every child has a right to learn. Teaching is what the teachers are for. If you were slacking off and still passing with minimal effort, they should have accelerated you to the point you could no longer do that without working at it. That would have better taught you the value of work in addition to not wasting years of your life. In my opinion, it's a crime that schools waste so much of the lives of intelligent children for no better reason than "but that's where a child of such age SHOULD be."

Thanks!

So, in other words, kids who delay kindergarten (and had another full year of pre-K in-leiu) tended to do better at sitting still in a classroom after a full year of practice than kids who didn't get that year of practice?

Well, their reasoning may be faulty, but I'm not entirely sure the result is wrong. In my opinion, computers should be avoided (in schools) when the teachers have no idea what they're doing or how they're doing it. There's so much technology in schools when a simple blackboard would get the job done and save more time. Most elementary teachers don't have the time or interest to learn enough technology to keep up with the changes from year to year. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for kids having access to computers. I'd just like for them to be able to get their questions answered or get real help when they run into a problem.

Oh they do, depending on how you define "mature". The primary difference isn't really an age thing though. Typically, girls in classrooms are perfectly happy to sit still and listen. Boys, not so much. Obviously, this isn't binary, it's a continuum. But oh boy does it skew heavily.

When we're talking about a general rule for the masses, I don't think different cutoffs would be that helpful past 4-years old. It would be more beneficial to split them up and teach them differently. That said, it's far more important for parents to make these decisions for their own child. Sometimes they're ready, sometimes they aren't. But there's a lot of growth that can happen when we aren't quite ready for something or when we don't think they are. Everyone is far too afraid of failure, or barring failure, afraid of difficulty. Let them try. They might surprise you. If they struggle, help them along. The trouble is, there are a lot of kids who struggle and simply can't or won't get the help they need to grow through it.

My now-6-year-old learned to count backwards before he could count forward. Rockets!

I've definitely been happy with some of the concepts that are taught early (like 0) and not quite so happy with some others. But, I've mostly went into this with the expectation that I'll probably be solidifying concepts more than his teachers will. This is primarily due to my time with him being 1-on-1 and sometimes because I know him better and can speak his language easier.

It heavily depends on previous experience. Whether the child is taught at home or attends a pre-school and what that pre-school is trying to teach. Education is a bit of a passion of mine even though I'm not a teacher (of other people's kids) so what follows may be long-winded. I'll try to stay on point and hopefully provide some value to the discussion.

Anecdotally, most of the pre-K programs around here (Indianapolis) teach toward Kindergarten preparedness, which is to say, they teach the alphabet and associated sounds and most of the digraphs and diphthongs as well, and for Mathematics generally counting as high as you can make it (most of ours target between 20 and 100), some simple single-digit addition, and shapes.

Kindergarten here focuses fairly heavily on reading. From sight-words to all-out phonics, reading is the primary objective. Kindergarten, however, is the year in school with the highest variance in ability between children, and as such can lead to very different perspectives. My oldest child is 6 years old and in 1st grade at the moment. He's a bit of an outlier though, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. He was easily ready for Kindergarten when he was 4. He has a March birthday though, so it would have taken quite some convincing to get the school to accept him early. His maturity level though, led us to keep him in pre-K and send him to Kindergarten on-time. Even so, he's essentially reading between a 4th and 5th grade level before he's even halfway through first grade. There are about 4-6 others in his school that are around the same level (99%ile on every test they're given). Others in his class have exactly the opposite situation. Some, are just not ready developmentally. Some simply aren't interested. Some kids have older siblings and are used to acting out to get any attention. Some of them didn't attend any pre-school at all. And some that didn't attend a pre-school receive zero help at home. My son's Kindergarten class (at the start of the year) had kids that ranged from having a 2nd-grade reading level to those that didn't know any of the letters of the alphabet. But they all generally are able to read around a 1st grade level by the end of the year. I have a profound respect for Kindergarten teachers after last year! Having a classroom of 20-30 kids of such widely varying abilities seems like a fairly impossible situation to me.

In any case, I can speak of my oldest son's experience a lot more than I can of anyone else. So, understand that what I say skews toward the high-ability scale. But I don't know of any Kindergarten classrooms that don't teach reading. I'd be curious to know where you went to school because that seems completely contrary to my experience. Our teachers sent home paper copies of stories for our children to read to us, and this started within the first month of Kindergarten. I'm sure the results were varied, but they taught it.

I went to Kindergarten in 1987 and they taught us how to read there as well. Some of us had a head start from what our parents taught us. Most of us didn't go to any sort of pre-school, and in general, all of us were 5 when we started. By the end of Kindergarten, everyone in my class could read around a first-grade level at minimum. We could do single and two-digit addition and subtraction and we were starting to work on memorizing the multiplication tables. We were taught some rudimentary music reading (notes on the treble and bass clefs) as well. Granted, this was an all-day Kindergarten at a private school (in Michigan) with a smallish class size (~22) but I didn't feel it was too atypical. It wasn't until I was in college that I learned that not all Kindergarten classes were full-day. And it wasn't until I had kids that I found out that a lot of things I learned in Kindergarten weren't "standard". But when I was kid, everyone could read by the time they were in 1st grade. Spelling and Vocabulary were all that was holding anyone back at that point.

Similar to just about anything I read these days about parenting, I found some things I agreed with and a few that I don't. What has always been troubling to me however, is "our" (society, media, whomever) propensity to blame our children's activities for the disconnect between what they enjoy doing and what we, as parents, think they should be doing.

There are benefits that can be obtained from playing games, video or otherwise. I, personally, have used pokemon to teach reading, story-telling, math, strategy, problem solving, and a myriad of other things to my oldest son. His brother isn't far behind him. We play minecraft, smash bros, mario kart; I even recently introduced him to portal 2. Some of what I let him do is for fun. Some is to gauge his interest in things. Other times I use the time to teach him something new. But the biggest factor of this strategy working is and will almost always be parental involvement.

Most of the backlash I see/hear/read about from other parents is due primarily to an unwillingness to get interested in what their children are interested in. They'll buy them the game and go enjoy some "peace and quiet" and never think twice about it. There's something to be said of a parent really taking an interest and learning about a new universe with their children. I'm far from perfect, but that's what I've been attempting, and it's working out pretty well so far.

There was a quote in an Orson Scott Card book, "The Lost Gate" where the main character speaks of his sort-of adopted mother/trainer/mentor where he mentions that "Love ... it's a term for the woman in my life who loves me enough to read the novels I'm reading just so she can try to figure out what they're teaching me."

TL;DR - Games aren't inherently good or bad. But it's up to the parent to actually do the parenting. They can't just throw a "good video game" in front of their children and expect them to magically grow into engineers or doctors.

There are some limitations still, but ubuntu juju [1] was the first thing that came to mind that somewhat fulfills the requirements.

[1] https://juju.ubuntu.com/