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I have a second grade boy who is moderately gifted in math. He has finished memorizing all of his math facts (addition/subtraction/multiplication/division)and I'm looking for resources to use after school (only ~10 min/day)and in the summer. He isn't challenged in math at school so I want to give him a bit of that at home, but not something that will take up too much time. I've looked at the third grade curriculum and he has mastered most of that so I'm probably looking for something in the fourth grade range. Any help?

If you want to keep it light and breezy, I would look at using living books. You could look at livingmath.net for ideas. This would allow you to introduce above level concepts without the pressure of output.

Many people enjoy the Sir Cumfrence books and Theonni Pappas's books. We preferred the more advanced "Young Math" books, bases, binary, venn diagrams, etc, and "The Number Devil". Either way, I would try to get them from the library or ILL since many of these resources are both out of print and quirky... So it is hard to predict what you and your kid will like.

Oh also.... check out http://bedtimemath.org/

We have never used this but our friends with kids in public school love it. Simple problems to use for a few minutes a day to stretch kid's thinking.

Maybe Primary Grade Challenge Math book by Zaccaro

or the Life of Fred books are fun stories that include math and do not take much time to complete a chapter. It is a homeschool math curriculum and introduces math in a different order than our schools, and has a bit more depth. It does mention God here and there, as a disclaimer, in case you would want to know.

In a roughly analogous situation I used the Khan academy to move
through long division/fractions/percentages/decimals.

1. We basically did about 10-15 minutes a day.
2. I chose the topic progression to keep it sane and introduced
the techniques myself rather than using the videos.
3. Beyond mastering these skills we then switched back to using
textbooks in small time increments.

The problem sets for these basic skills I thought were reasonable and my son liked the badge/point structure.

I second Life of Fred. It puts Math in a context, focusing more on the concepts of Math, rather than just the rote problem solving.

Does he like workbooks? My DD loves going through workbooks, so we just do Singapore Math, and she loves seeing herself making progress. My DS didn't like workbooks at that age and it was tougher to find systematic enrichment. I think I found math competition problems and puzzles online and gave him some once in a while.

I used some workbooks from the critical thinking company last summer (math analogies and "building thinking skills"). The math analogies book was great, I liked the variety of problems. Building thinking skills was ok, sort of hit or miss. I also have the primary grade challenge math book, he worked through a couple of lessons last summer but did not finish it.

I'm torn between giving him problem solving type of work and a regular curriculum like Singapore math. I don't want him getting too far ahead and being even more bored in math at school. They don't offer any math acceleration in the district except in the highly gifted program, which I doubt he will qualify for (they test for that next year, and this year's cogat score put him at the moderately gifted level). At the same time, he is totally ready for more advanced math, and I think he will be likely be bored anyway next near.

These are some books that my eight-year-old loves! His favorite mathy book is The Number Devil, which he loves to hear at bedtime. We also use khanacademy.org and loved the Sir Cumference series when he was younger.


Amazing Math Projects you can Build is great for kids who enjoy building things.

http://www.horrible-science.co.uk/books
You can also find these on amazon; they are super-interesting science books written for kids with a gruesome touch. Some of them discuss gory topics so preview if you're squeamish.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Museum-Mysteries-Maths-Quest/dp/1609920864
There is a whole series of these books best found by googling the author. My son loves them and they are very interactive.

The Art of Problem Solving Beast Academy books are done in a comic book format and are quite entertaining.

Hope that's helpful to you! :-)

I can't believe there are this many posts in the thread before someone mentions Murderous Maths!

http://www.murderousmaths.co.uk/