LOL! It's a great analogy, and dead on, I think. I wrestled with this same issue last year, and ultimately I decided that you definitely try going deep first, mainly since it tends to be more convenient for the teacher. (Realism there...) If enrichment works for the kid and it's enough, then great. But for a lot of HG+ kids in elementary school, deeper simply won't be enough! There's only so deep you can go with basic calculation! As you say, logic and story problems are great, but even those get old if you're just working on 3-digit addition or the like...There's just very little depth to plumb there! Until you get to somewhat higher math--though I'm not sure how high you have to get--it's just plain hard to go deep.
You can do things not included in the curriculum. Maybe that's "going wide?" LOL! I do like that approach and have used this a bit myself. The history of math is not in the normal curriculum, and that's something we're attacking this year. Tesselations, Escher's stuff and fractals are popular with the homeschool crowd even with pretty young kids but aren't the norm in schools, I don't think. (I could be wrong...) I do think you can slow things down in that way without boring the pants off a kid.
My strategy is go deep and go wide until I see that I'm starting to lose him, then I'll go on to the next thing. With these kids, I think that means you're going to go a little fast at least, if not really fast...But I don't see a way around it.
What's more, I don't see any compelling reason not to!
Last edited by Kriston; 08/27/08 07:44 PM. Reason: to honor a friend's request for editing out a quote.
