When considering having a home-schooled child skip a grade, you need to think about context. The increase in flexibility home schooling provides over a brick-and-mortar school may mean that the home-schooled child is not working with traditional grade levels to begin with. Other aspects to consider include any state-mandated restrictions, which vary by state, or the requirements of an accredited or specialized coursework program. While skipping a grade has potential in most home-schooling contexts, doing so in accredited or other specialized programs may jeopardize the nearest graduation level requirements, such as elementary to middle level or high school level graduation requirements.
Homeschooling flexibility also allows the parents homeschooling a child to avoid the “all or nothing” approach to grade skipping necessary when the child attends public or private brick-and-mortar schools. While it is certainly possible for a child to skip a grade when home schooling, consider using a more flexible approach to graded material. Allow the child to skip the subject areas of a specific grade that he has already demonstrated a mastery in, while simultaneously having the child complete subject material at the comparable grade level for subjects in which he has not shown as high a performance level.
Another approach to grade tailoring for home schooling children involves add-ons and subject combination. While it is indeed possible to have the child skip the work of a particular grade, a child may benefit more if you take the lesson material from a given grade level and mix it with add-ons and cross-subject assignments. For example, if your child has strong language skills, make the vocabulary lessons more interesting by applying the same or a similar type of vocabulary-building exercise as the standard English lesson entails to other subjects such as science, history and geography.
A variety of different factors, in addition to the curriculum itself, may enter into your decision about having a child skip a grade or even portions of the coursework for a particular grade. The rapid learning curve of a gifted child, for example, may prompt a home-schooling family’s choice for the child to skip one or more grades over the course of the home-schooled child’s pre-college education. The proximity of college admission also may enter in as a factor in this decision. Generally, the lower grade levels allow a child more opportunities to retrace skipped coursework, if later needed, than grades approaching college admission age. Enrollment in a specialized program also factors as a consideration in such a decision. Home-schooled children enrolled in an accredited program affiliated with a particular religious organization, for example, most likely will, at a minimum, need to complete the coursework for each grade level related to the precepts of the organization.