How “Redshirting” Affects Your Classroom

Originally published on SchoolingTinyHumans.com on October 9, 2018

What is Redshirting?

Redshirting is when parents decide to forgo the district’s cut-off date for Kindergarten and send their child a year later, making them one of the oldest in their class.? Parents make this decision to increase their child’s competitive edge academically and often in athletics.

In our local districts, the cut-off date is October 1st.? This means if you’re born before that date, you can enroll in Kindergarten for the upcoming school year.? However, many parents will hold their July, August, and September babies back, as if their birthday is after that cut-off date.? Some may even hold back a child born in June.

What Does that Mean for Your Classroom?

The age span of your children is wider.

Instead of having a twelve-month span of ages in your class, you can now have a sixteen-month span of students in your classroom.? In a Kindergarten class, you can have children start the year at four while some come in already six-years-old.

We all know how different kids can be age-wise in preschool and primary grades.? A five-year-old is leaps and bounds ahead of a four-year-old. ? Imagine the difficulties when you add six-year-olds into the mix?

Getting classwork done can be a challenge.

My biggest hurdle with varied ages is getting classwork done.? The older children finish very quickly and the younger children need much more time to complete the same activity.? Sometimes, I’m able to differentiate (“Oh, you finished the letter puzzle?? Now, put it in ABC order.”).? Other times, I give the children a secondary activity (“If you’re finished, you may go to the puzzle table.”)

But, then there’s the flip side.? Some activities the older children do with a lot more care and attention to detail than the younger ones.? This is more evident during journaling (click here to read about journaling in our room!). ? The youngest children usually scribble a picture quickly and call it quits.? My oldest children can work for forty-five minutes or longer if given the time to do so.

What happens to either end of the bell curve?

We generally teach to the middle of the class.? By redshirting, we create significant outliers on either side of the class’ spectrum. ? Older children may be bored and become behavior problems.? Younger children may be in above their heads, squashing their self-esteem before their academic careers even get going.

If children were within the smaller, twelve-month span, maybe the curriculum will become slightly easier because we don’t have older children forcing an increase in difficulty (because they’re in the next grade, where the curriculum is on their level).? The extremes in the classroom would be much closer.? Fewer children would fall by the wayside.

Balancing every student’s needs becomes harder.

Studies show there’s no advantage of redshirting for the individual child, but it’s certainly more taxing on the teacher when districts allow it.? Teachers must differentiate even more than is already expected in primary grades.? Since a majority of states still do not have full-day Kindergarten, teachers will have to do this with even less time than first- and second-grade teachers.? We are asking teachers to do much more without giving them enough time to do it.

“Does my child need special services?”

Chances are, you’ll be asked to initiate proceedings for special-education services by panicked parents.? Maybe these children do need services, but many probably are developmentally appropriate for their younger age.? It just looks like they’re behind because the other kids are developmentally-appropriate for their older age.

Should we really be expecting those four-year-olds to read at the same time as the six-year-olds?? But, parents become alarmed when their child isn’t doing what the other kids are.

So What Can We Do?

This blog post is not meant to take a stand on whether or not we should be redshirting students.? Regardless of opinions, it’s already happening and will continue to do so.

All we can really do is prepare ourselves as best we can for the challenges ahead.? The best way to do that is to be aware of the issues you’ll face in your classroom. ? This will help you verbalize issues that come up in your room to panicked parents who are worried about their child.

Secondly, it is possible to orient many of your classroom routines to accommodate the varied ability levels of your students.? I always make sure to have a second activity that the students can do independently while I work with the younger students.? You could have coloring pages or puzzles related to a unit you’re working on in class.? Another idea is a quiet reading corner with unit-related books or just ones the students are interested in (like Frozen or Cars).

Another way I differentiate is by having a “bonus activity” to complete.? For instance, if you have a worksheet working on a specific letter, I ask students who finish early to draw pictures of words starting with the same letter on the back of the paper.

What issues do you see in your classroom because of redshirting?? Comment below.