Right there with you, namaste.
My 6th grader is advanced to 7th grade science, has placed out of 8th grade in my mind (but not entirely in the school's), 9th grade physical science is a joke (the school is beginning to recognize that, though otherwise required in 9th), and the HS biology teachers are evidently detrimental to the love of science.
Some of the issue is that my child is ready to learn the habits of scientific thought and problem solving beyond parroting the scientific method. Many middle schoolers are not yet ready for this cognitively, which is a lot of the problem with MS science. DD has a huge amount of content knowledge, though with some holes betraying the self-taught nature of her learning. Science is also inherently active. I'm an active scientist (professor), and I don't teach with computer animations because students don't learn effectively nearly as well as they do from active learning.
So, in finding her a science program, I'm looking for something that
*Teaches problem solving, scientific thinking, and the subject-specific content.
*Provides as much hands-on learning (computer animations kept to a minimum) as possible.
*Teaches that science is quantitative and uncertainties matter.
I can teach this, though I would struggle with the hands on part due to my own time pressures, and lab facilities aren't of the nature she'd need.
There are online courses all with significant problems (
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....cs/181161/Science_online.html#Post181161 Stanford Science online might be an exception), and the synchronous nature of the Stanford course would be potentially a problem considering that my child is still in school and we're in a different time zone.
If you have the time and energy, Nebel's Foundations of Scientific Understanding is good (though the tides section leaves something to be desired), but will take significant parent input.
We're currently thinking of leaving DD in the school's science class for next year and finding a local college student to mentor DD in the practical and quantitative aspects of science, and put her into the 10th grade biology holding our noses when she's in 8th.
