Thanks for the comments! I appreciate the help!
'Neato: Is Aleks really any different than Singapore, aside from the fact that it's online?
I know other people using it who love it, but I'm not convinced that it's really going to be any more conceptual. I trust you though, so if you think it's more conceptual, I'm willing to give it a try! Thank you!
LMom: I was thinking about Life of Fred. I checked out their website and everything, but it didn't seem any more conceptual, just more verbal. What do you think? We really do need more ideas, not just more words.
I haven't heard of the Zaccaro book, but I'll look into it. Thanks!
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Another question: Would I be a bad teacher if I let DS use a calculator some of the time (not all) so that we can move on to more challenging problems? "Yes, you'd be bad" is a valid answer.
I think I'll give DS6 the Singapore placement test for 3A. If he knows it all already, we'll just skip it. If he knows most of it, I'll teach just what he misses on the test and nothing else. And so on with each placement test until we get to one that he really needs. I guess I'm looking for those gaps...
Tonight at dinner, DH--who is an engineer--and I sat trying to think of typical elementary school math concepts that DS hasn't been exposed to yet, and we came up with a precious few. I'm now checking online as I write this to add to the list, and I see that he needs to know multiplying and dividing fractions (we've covered adding and subtracting them and finding a common denominator), long division, multi-place multiplication problems, the more complex geometry (like figuring the area and circumference of a circle [though he knows Pi r squared, the Pythagorean theorem, and some of the other common geometric formulas aleady], rays, measuring angles, etc.), probability, negative numbers (though he's picked up some of this already), X/Y coordinates, and we could do some computer programming. But without knowing hs times tables, some of this is going to be hard to do.
Hmmm, now that I've written that, I'm thinking we should do probability, geometry, X/Y graphing, negative numbers and computers. Huh. That might constitute the rest of our year now that I think about it...
...Or it might be a week's worth of work if we go through it as fast as we've been ripping through Singapore. I really am trying to go "deeper, not faster," but we seem to be failing that.
*Concerned and tired sigh*
Anyway, thanks for indulging my confused ramblings/musings! It's helping me a ton to have your thoughts and comments!
K-
