Thank you all once again for all the thoughful responses. This thread has made me painfully aware of the lack of resources available where we live for mathematically talented children. In our area (small European city with a large university) there are no maths enrichment programs, apart from some after-school classes directed to children who are behind. There are a couple of abacus/Kumon academies, and that's it (my son tried abacus once and absolutely hated it).

So, it seems that any enrichment will have to be done at home. This is making me quite anxious because both my husband and I are very non-mathy (we both dropped maths at 16) and I feel that I soon won't be able to teach him.

So far, my son has been learning in a very non-systematic way. He can't add in columns or regroup because we basically let him figure out himself how to add - he first learnt to add up to 20, then learnt how to add tens and we then reminded him that he could decompose numbers in tens and ones and then add them up, so he never had to deal with regrouping.

However, now that he is more advanced I am feeling quite lost, because I don't know what to teach first or how to lead him so that he can discover what he needs by himself. I really don't know what he can do. Some things, like integers, seem to come naturally to him - working on the left or on the right of the number line is all the same for him.

The last couple of weeks we have been working on multiples and this led us to "discover" prime numbers. He seems to be interested and has been making some interesting observations on the topic: "I love 2 because it has so many multiples", "prime numbers are like blue, which you can mix with red and get purple".

He has no homework from school and the only after school activity that he does is one hour of chess a week, because he decided that he wanted to spend more time at home this year. We have never given him worksheets and treat Beast Academy just like any other game (do you want to read? do you want to play with your Legos? do you want to play maths on the computer?), although I am beginning to wonder whether we should push him a little so that he learns how to make an effort.

We are also trying to learn more mathematics ourselves and make maths a conversation topic at home, but I know that he will soon surpass us both.

Last edited by Isabel; 03/04/19 06:06 AM.