AlexsMom's post reminded me to go and trawl through the CTY website again, and there are a number of online courses there that might appeal to DS-almost-8. But qualifying, particularly from outside the US seems like a rather bureaucratic palaver; he'd have to take SCAT, pay twice to do so, and the sample questions (I guess he'd count as a 3rd grader so would have to take the elementary one) make it look as though he'd be more likely to come out of the testing experience patronised than stretched. So that doesn't totally appeal, although it may be that really I should just get over that feeling...
OTOH, he's been doing the SAT daily question daily for fun for the last 6 weeks or so, and in that time I've seen *one* maths question that gave him any trouble at all. Experimentally, I had him take two timed sections of the maths practice paper, and his performance was such as to scale up to a SAT-M of over 600, with time being the only real issue (he made one careless error on each section, and otherwise lost marks only for what he didn't get to). The 700 that would qualify him for SET looks within foreseeable-future reach, and for purposes of CTYOnline it looks as though that'd be a good way to sidestep the bureaucracy as well as being more fun, and perhaps more worthwhile in that his having qualified young for SET might impress somebody someday. (There's a SAT centre near us, and you can just sent in SAT scores that qualify for SET after the fact, rather than having to sign up with CTY before you even take the test as happens otherwise.)
But - the full SAT is a long, long time to concentrate (and not chatter!) when you're 8. He would, I assume, have to sit there for the whole thing, even if he was only doing certain sections? (There would definitely be no point in his attempting the essay, that's my main thought; the rest is all quite fun, though he'd do less well in the writing and CR sections than in the maths of course.) Has anyone had their child do the SAT at around this age, and if so, how did it go? I'm not sure whether I'm crazy to be even thinking about this, or not.
