My two daughters took the CTY Young Readers classes (one for 2/3rd and other for 4/5th graders). I think I wrote about our experience in depth in an entry few months ago here, if you can search my prior entries. My kids really liked the online course, it was quite interactive with the other students, so they felt like they were part of a class, I thought the syllabus content and assignments were well-structured, creative, requiring more insightful understanding of the books, and the weekly teacher feedbacks were also thoughtful and useful. Most importantly, it required the students to support their ideas with specific cites, so it forced them to be more disciplined about stating their positions. One of the writing assignments every week had a more open-ended, creative element to it. In summary, it served our purposes of having a fun but structured way to keep up with reading/writing through the summer. You can also check each class syllabus on the CTY website