TBH, I'm sort of troubled by the above. Mind you, I did essentially the same thing with my two (same birth order/gender, 5 yrs between). I think that not giving the older more math extension is part of why she feels inferior to her brother in math. Also, I think leaving her math education up to the school was a mistake and has not served her as well as it could have.
That's very sad. In the best possible situation a child would be able to pick up the pace later and suffer no ill effects from artificially retarded progress early on, but I'm worried that DS7 would suffer from a lack of challenge, aside from how much further back he would be set on his learning curve toward mastery (and is already set, unfortunately). I am pretty meek about initiating every push with the school, and honestly find the whole process stressful and distasteful, but I just worry that I'm not doing enough for him.
If you don't want to duplicate what the school is going to do, why not look for different materials that cover areas that they'll never get to? DS took a class from Imacs last year that was fun for him and also completely different from school math. It was based on logic and set theory mostly. Math competition problems are fun and often very different from the type of work the kids get at school. Or logic puzzle books...
IMACS is cool. DS and I used to both work the challenge problems posted by IMACS on Facebook. He does enjoy some other math-related activities, and I think that those can help greatly to keep interest stimulated and develop problem-solving skills. I
still don't want his progress through normal math skills development artificially slowed, though.
I've found that my daughter often wishes that she'd asked for the things that she sees her brother doing - robotics kits, logic puzzles, lego, sometimes math problems. She has very different interests from her brother but does enjoy some of the same things when exposed to them. Perhaps that is just the dynamic in our house though.
Right now DS3 is in puppy dog mode, and has to get involved in everything he sees his big brother doing. It's undeniably keeping him highly stimulated. Some things, like plugging together Mindstorms pieces, come more easily than others, like typing Java (his syntax
sucks).
