We had an unusual situation. We lived in one state with a late birthday cutoff for preschool and our oldest attended preschool there at a parochial school. Then the military moved us to another state over the summer which has an early birthday cutoff with no exceptions. At that point that choice was to keep her home and do kindergarten work or keep her home and do nothing since the new state did not offer preschool. It was pretty easy to convince him that doing something was better than doing nothing.
This summer we had to choose if we would send her to kindergarten (she's already doing first grade work) or keep her home and do first grade. The school will not consider placing her in first grade because her birthday is a few days too late. My husband said that he felt that she would just have to be a 'victim of the system' - not on my watch! I ended up convincing him that keeping her home for first grade would be best since we're moving this fall anyway. It was that and showing him the public school curriculum, even he readily admitted that sending a just about six year old who is reading and doing math problems to kindergarten where she would be taught letter sounds and counting to twenty before and after naptime would be a huge disservice to her.
I'm not sure I've convinced him past this school year but I think I'm pretty close. The public schools where we're moving are awful and because the public options are so terrible the private and parochial schools can charge whatever they want and would be over $10,000 a year for our two school age kids. I've explained how even with buying all the books we want, going on lots of field trips, seeking out all kinds of lessons and classes for the kids, and so on we would only be spending a quarter of that. There is also the angle of freedom, we get to take days off when we want and travel whenever which is a huge bonus when all of our family lives in other states. If the kids were in school our visits would be limited to twice a year but now we get to take a few weeks when we feel like to take long visits and are able to visit historical sites, zoos, museums, and so on while traveling.
This summer we had to choose if we would send her to kindergarten (she's already doing first grade work) or keep her home and do first grade. The school will not consider placing her in first grade because her birthday is a few days too late. My husband said that he felt that she would just have to be a 'victim of the system' - not on my watch! I ended up convincing him that keeping her home for first grade would be best since we're moving this fall anyway. It was that and showing him the public school curriculum, even he readily admitted that sending a just about six year old who is reading and doing math problems to kindergarten where she would be taught letter sounds and counting to twenty before and after naptime would be a huge disservice to her.
I'm not sure I've convinced him past this school year but I think I'm pretty close. The public schools where we're moving are awful and because the public options are so terrible the private and parochial schools can charge whatever they want and would be over $10,000 a year for our two school age kids. I've explained how even with buying all the books we want, going on lots of field trips, seeking out all kinds of lessons and classes for the kids, and so on we would only be spending a quarter of that. There is also the angle of freedom, we get to take days off when we want and travel whenever which is a huge bonus when all of our family lives in other states. If the kids were in school our visits would be limited to twice a year but now we get to take a few weeks when we feel like to take long visits and are able to visit historical sites, zoos, museums, and so on while traveling.
