Hello everyone,
I really enjoy reading your forum thanks,
I know someone will be able to help me with this.
I am officially the mother of a gifted underachiever (tra da!).
He is now 9 and showed early promise in math, for example at 99.9th centile on a WJIII achievement test at 6.0, did a thing called a Keymath revised NU at 7.4 which gave maths ages of between 10 and 14.
He is at a great school which has lots of gifted kids, however his maths is literally stagnating. His maths at for the last 3 semesters has been 10, 10.5, 10.5. He is grade skipped, so this means he is now pretty much at grade level!
His maths now is truly terrible, he used to love doing maths with me and he was so ... brilliant, now, he does not seem to read the question or put any thought into it at all, just blurts out the answer which is to his surprise often wrong. He refuses to do any written working out at all and i have said that it's better to get the question right and who cares if you have to do working out, but he won't listen!
We used to do maths at home but he has not wanted to for 2 years and we have not done any as I don't want to push him. However now I am Worried.
I was thinking of asking the school if he would be able to do an online distance math course instead of normal maths as he seems unable to do/learn maths in the classroom. I should add that his peaks of maths ability related to periods of homeschooling or afterschooling and the good test results only come from one-on-one assessments with ed psychs. In the classroom he does not perform well. He liked doing math on the computer ,

Two questions!
1. Does this story ring any bells for anyone? Especially why his maths is now so terrible? It's gone backwards!!!
2. Can you recommend a course? I am not in the US. I can pay course fees. I have heard of EPGY and it sounds good, any others?

(I posted recently about his low PSI on a WISC IV)

Thanks so much.....

EPGY is a possibility, there is also a program called CTY through John Hopkins. A program many on here use is called ALEKS. It is certainly much more "budget friendly". You pay a monthly fee for use of their site and your child can continue through all of the courses.

My DS6 is being grade skipped to 4th next year and the school is looking at having him use ALEKS for math since his math levels are beyond elementary.

Good Luck and Welcome!

Wow, Shari, thanks so much. I really like the look of ALEKS. And so much cheaper! And you can use a Mac!
Thanks again

http://eimacs.org/Home.htm

My son is taking a math logic course through this site.

From what I understand, it really doesn�t parallel any of the usual school math sequence. I think it is considered high school/college level, but at 12, he is one of the oldest in his (class instruction) group of math gifted kids.

The program he is in is partial in class instruction, part online.

NinjaNoodle,
Reading your post is so like what we go through with our 10 year old son.

He blurts out ansers without thought and in extremely resistant to working out the problems using pen and paper or doing double checks. What we are learning is that around this age math becomes much more multiple step processes and that our son was so used to doing everything in his head but now he is having trouble keeping all the steps straight mentally. (ADD may be a cmponent. More evaluations this summer about that) The problem is that writing it down feels like he is following the car doing 5 MPH in the 55 zone. DS is also subject advanced in math. One other problem we discovered was that the volume of problems expected of DS was more than 2 times that expected of his age mates. This in effect was burning him out on math. His IEP for next year will limit the volume of work but increase the complexity (I Hope).

I definately second Aleks Math. Although DS is not enthralled about doing it, we used in the past to provide a challenge and are using it this summer to try to get DS used to writing his work and doing double checks so that that is an ingrained habit by next Fall.

Good luck!

Very happy with Aleks, thanks everyone, the school has agreed and he is doing it in class. Amazingly he is quite happy to do some at home too. He is covering heaps of new material. Early days yet but so far I could not be more pleased!