Typepad is being rotten, rotten, rotten. It just deleted a long and clever post. A quick summary and hopes of writing more after I deal with tech support in the morning...
I have been utterly absorbed for the past week with several crises. The work crisis is resolved. The Ian crisis rages on.
We're in the midst of finding the right placement for Ian for next year. I'll come back to this tomorrow.
Seems like many people are questioning when kids are ready for kindergarten.
Very interesting article. What they gloss over, though, is the gender differences in "redshirted" kids. The class at issue had one boy and one girl, but in my experience, it is far more often the boy who gets redshirted. This leads to problems (either immediately, or a few years later) with bullying, when the redshirted boy has hit his growth spurt and is now taller and 15 months older than the youngest boy in the class.
One of my daughters' pre-schools divides the kids into three classes, by strict birthday age, so that each class has kids who are within about 4 months of each other. That strikes me as a very sensible thing to do, since most schools have more than one kindergarten. There would be less of a desire to redshirt, I think, if all the summer/fall birthdays were in class with each other, and not forced onto the same bell curve as the January birthdays.
Wasn't even mentioned as an option here, though.
Posted by: Ragtime | June 08, 2007 at 11:05 AM