Zaichiki: yes, for homeschooling, I like SM. (Just to clarify, I was answering Ren's original question, which related to school, not home use.)
Is EM even available for home use? I'm sure you could buy it somewhere on the Internet, but I've never heard of anyone using EM for homeschooling.
Like others, I also highly recommend the SM home instructor's guide and the "Intensive Practice" workbooks. IMHO, I liked "IP" more than "Challenging Word Problems" because it has more than just word problems, and they really are challenging. Even my engineer DH had to think about some of the problems! The arithmetic in them isn't hard, but the thinking is!
As for the instructor's guide...Despite being an English major, I am not math phobic--I took calculus both in high school and college and I always got good grades in math. But there's a big difference between getting a grade and really understanding the math well enough to teach it. The guide helped me with really understanding. Not to mention the fact that it was nice to have the games and stuff in the guide for hands-on work, since I would never have come up with that stuff on my own. Having the instructor's guide was REALLY useful to me.
My biggest complaint about SM was actually that it was not good with an asynchronous math kid. He needed more concepts, less calculation, less repetition. (And SM is WAY better about this than most math programs, but it just showed me that sometimes a program--even a good one!--isn't going to work for some kids.)
I suspect if we went back to SM, it would be better now because his multiplication skills have caught up. But there for a while last year, it was not working well. I didn't love the fact that there was a section on multiplying 2-digit numbers, then one about multiplying 3-digit numbers in the next workbook, *then* one about multiplying 4-digit numbers in the *next* workbook. Those are not conceptually different, so it was a pretty dull stretch of math, especially for a 6yo boy who thoroughly understood the concept of how to multiply multiple digits after the first exposure to it, but for whom the actual work of multiplying was REALLY slow!
That was when we dropped SM and went on to geometry. There he could work on some new concepts without all the arithmetic. It was a much better fit!
He has since caught up on the arithmetic just through regular use on higher concept math. Adding and subtracting fractions has really helped, with all the factoring involved to find denominators. And it's challenging enough that he wants to do the work. More than once I have told him he'd done enough for the day, but he wanted to keep going!
That's a long way of saying that sometimes even the "best" curriculum for GT kids isn't going to work well for some kids.
