Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Math resources to use during school

After asking for several years, my ds10's teacher brought it up herself this year! They are going to allow him to take the year end test in math and if all goes well then they will let him go on a separate track for math the rest of this year!
After getting nowhere the last few years, now I don't know what I want!! I think I have a shot, so I'd like to know your ideas about it.
He is out of school one day for their offsite gifted programming, but they do two periods of math on Fridays, so he would have approximately 5 -6 hours during the school week to work individually. They use Everyday Math at his school. We have been after schooling with Singapore Math, but I had considered changing to more topic oriented Math mammoth this year. My first idea is to do the MM fractions and decimals along with the Life of Fred books on the same topic.
What would you do if you had this opportunity?

Sounds like a great plan! So great to have the teacher suggesting it. The only addition is to peak at the Art of Problem Solving website so you will know when your son is ready.
Yippee!
Grinity

Problems, investigations - e.g. from NRich and from competitions at the appropriate level (whether or not he enters them). If you say what kind of level he's at now and what he's excited about, we may be able to be more specific... Sounds like a good opportunity!

Thank you for your suggestions. I met with the teacher yesterday and she was very nice and agreeable to most anything.

He's not too advanced right now - I purposely didn't really accelerate too much at home for fear what this year would look like, but I think he will move quickly through once we start. He picks it up quickly. The dreaded "spiral" approach in third grade has really resulted in knowing a lot of what they cover in fourth in fifth grade. If you know how to multiply two digits - three and four aren't much different:)

I am torn between really drilling the basics - making him work forward and master multiplication, division and fractions, or letting him do problem solving and address those topics as they come up?

Last night I tried to review his Math mammoth book to see where he should start today in class, but he was not interested:) I'm just not sure how to make it work - teach at home and let him do practice at school is what I'd like to do, I think. I'm sure some experimentation will help.

I'm afraid that he will lose focus in school listening to the class and not get anything done at all. That's why I think maybe challenging word problems might be a better fit, over more boring drills? I tried to get him on board with some interesting computer programs, but he is resisting that as well.

I'm sure we will work something out. It's over 5 hours of math a week - anything has to better than doing work you already know. I am grateful we have the opportunity to figure it out!

My DYS10 was using EM in his curriculum. I think somehow that stupid spiral taught him useful math concepts, though. For instance, last year, he scored 85th percentile among 8th graders on the Explore test in math (he was in 4th), with concepts he supposedly hadn't been exposed to.

We worked with the school and he's doing an online Art of Problem Solving class this year instead of EM, and the school has agreed to let him do the homework in class during the regular EM lessons. His teacher is a former college math teacher and is thrilled to help out.

Maybe you could make a similar arrangement with AOPS or some other course? I wouldn't want to do extra drills on the basics. Seems like that would just lead to some frustration about repitition. Davidson has a good list of math programs in the data base you could search.