Originally Posted by Irisheyes
Morning!
For some reason this morning, I was thinking about shellymos's son in a 4th grade math class (which I think you mentioned was still too easy). I was wondering, what sort of math is he doing?

In fact, I'd be interested in knowing about any of your children who are doing math acceleration -- specifically the grade level and the topics they're studying.


I am not exactly sure what they are doing this unit. they are using everday math and I know the first unit was geometry. Angles, rays, line segments, polygons, word problems related to these things. I know he is doing something entirely different this unit but has been out sick for most of this week so not sure. They also pull him aside in the classroom as the work is still pretty easy for him and he doesn't need the repetition after the lesson. So he does more complex stuff with the math coordinator who goes into his class with him almost every day. For enrichment he does whatever he has on his mind or whatever interesting things she thinks of. He has been doing calcudoku puzzles, they convert binary numbers, all sorts of things like that. He loves that stuff. And he seems to really like the math olympiad stuff as well. I am shocked at how quick he does those puzzles. I gave him his first one last night and it was timed at 4 minutes. I didn't want to time him because it was just practice and he asked me to time him. He figured it out in a minute and a half...but since he didn't really show his work I had no clue how he got his answer. He had written out an equation that I didn't get though....so I proceeded to spend 5 minutes doing it the way I would and writing out this complex thing only to end up with his answer. I ask him how he got it and he shows me and it was this strange way I would NEVER have thought of. Pretty cool though.

About the showing work he is funny. He does when he needs to, but he usually does most of it in his head and then goes back and does all the work to show how he came to that, sometimes the work is abbreviated just to give someone an idea. As the steps get harder I think he may need to show some of the work as the brain can only hold so many steps in it. Although clearly his brain holds more steps than mine.