Many of the resources I'm finding are Social-emotional, Parenting and Critical Thinking resources. All of these are wonderful, however I'm specifically looking for more challenging Math and Science for my 3rd Grader. For example, once she has learned her multiplication, I assume it's on to Division? And then to Pre-Algrebra? I just don't know what steps to take her through in sequence. The book-store workbooks seem too easy, or boring for her.

Is there any guide for parents that shows step-by-step what the kiddos should be learning in which grade?

I've asked her public school for the curriculum but it's either buried in the website, or nonexistent, because I couldn't find anything.

Thanks so much for any good tools that will tell me how to supplement her learning at home.

Are you looking for after-school enrichment, acceleration suggestions that would work within the school, or a homeschooling curriculum?

Are you in the US? What's your state? If it is on the Common Core Standard: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cc/

For math, Khan Academy is free and will give you a nice progression of skills: http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard

If you are looking for a complete curriculum, Singapore Math is popular.

Browse around, there are literally hundreds of suggestions in the forums.

The Mathematics Enhancement Programme and Sunshine Math are also free. Common choices for enrichment at your daughter's level include Life of Fred, which now has lower-level options, and Ed Zaccaro Challenge Math.

You could look at Kumon- we do some of their workbooks at home.
Making sure your child knows their math facts quickly is really important- esp. when they get to Algebra.
It looks to me like after division, they do (or make sure they know): Decimals, fractions (ultimately reducing and adding/subtracting them). Then pre-algebra, algebra, geometry.
You can try EPGY or CTY online if you want organized coursework or just do it yourself. HTH.

After the multiplication and division.. you need to make sure they understand fractions, add/subtract/multiply/divide fractions... also make sure he/she can do long division and multiplication...

After which you might want to make sure he/she can do word problems... it is really easy to teach a kid how to do the multiplication and division... but often it takes more time to get them to apply it. The word problems will help with that. I would make darned sure the word problem ability is there before moving on, sometimes people move kids too quickly because they can solve a problem.. but they forget that the kid also needs to know how to set up the problem from a description of the situation.

Hah! DS8's school has taken your message to heart. Math word problems (addition/subtraction) for going on 4 months now. DS recently refused to do anymore.

The thread title also asks about Science, but the content of the OP's and subsequent ones are just math.

State standards for science contain little content before middle school. I consider "science" to be more than a listing of facts or a loose application of doing a demonstration in class and making qualitative observations. (Hopefully I'm not maligning any teachers with this statement. What my kids do in school seem very aligned to the state standards. The problem is the standards, not the teachers.)

I think that a lot of kids are ready for significantly more a lot earlier. I'm working with my own kids to work on thinking about problems, making predictions, testing predictions, and evaluating the result to figure out why something happened.

I have found so few resources out there that actually address science through the scientific method before high school (if even then) that I'm actually contemplating writing a book in my non-existent free time. My book would be heavy on the physics and chemistry, leaving making endless posters of the flower or frog life cycle to do in every single year of elementary school (see above comment on state standards. Snore.).

I have recently bumped into a pair of books by Bernard Nebel ("Building foundations of scientific understanding...") They seem to fit that bill, but I haven't gotten my hand on a copy yet. I'd love to hear if anyone has seen these books, I'd love to hear comments on it from the perspective of teaching through the scientific method.

I've just bought Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding (last night) but haven't had the time to read much of it yet. There are three different books in the curriculum, and each can be bought in PDF form for $5.

Geo, if you write that book, we would be more than glad to road-test it.

Lucounu, let us konw how Building Foundations is, please. The price is certainly right.

DeeDee

$5 is a lot cheaper than the paper book, and brings it to a "ahhh, what the hell" type purchase. I'll wait for your review first.

I'll post a review tonight. One thing I should mention is that the PDFs are print-restricted (the restriction is strippable, but of course no one should ever do that). I do like having things in electronic form, but I like having books too-- if I wind up liking the grades 3-5 and 6-8 ones, I may buy the print versions too.

I did The Young Scientists Club with my son in first/second grade. It's like $10 per kit and they mail you a kit to do at home each month. We had alot of fun doing that and he learned alot.
He is doing right now an online science course through NU/NUMATS. It's very good but I'm realizing that we don't have alot of time to do an online course in addition to everything else we do! I was earlier doing a chemistry set with him we bought online, which has been alot of fun too.

Sorry for the delay on the review of BFSU... will definitely post something before bed tonight.

I am uncomfortable without some sort of science textbook. Though BFSU has plenty of additional reading suggestions, they are predictably within the normal reading range for the suggested age of the science lesson, so likely to sometimes be a bit down-level for a HG+ child.

I noticed that Glencoe / McGraw-Hill put out a series of science textbooks and supporting materials. Has anyone had experience with those? I ask because I was pleasantly surprised by the Glencoe World History, but I realize that that might not say much about the suitability of their entire line.

I'm thinking about buying a decent microscope. I bought DS one last year, but it turned out to be junk because I didn't know what I was doing. Is there a microscope anyone would recommend that would take a kid through the first years of science just fine, but as cheaply as possible? I am aware of the Brock Magiscope, but would like something a little more traditional-- I don't see us needing to do any microscope work in the field (DS has a decent little pocket scope for that anyway) and want something where it's easier to change objectives.

What are the features to look for in a microscope for a student at the middle and high school level? In particular, what's the minimum maximum magnification you'd recommend?

What features and magnification you want in a good student microscope really varies depending on what you want to use the microscope for. Edmund Scientific has a pretty good selection of microscopes for many different purposes. It looks like there are some reasonably decent ones there that would serve most middle-high school science purposes in the $150-300 range.

We got DS6 a microscope for his 5th birthday. Its the My First Lab DuoScope. Aculady is right- you can get some that will last up through high school science for a couple of hundred bucks. If, like us, you are looking for one that is pretty fully featured but not as powerful and doesn't quite have the highest level optics but comes at a good price there are a few to be found. (We didn't trust that our wonderfully bright but often clumsy 5 yr old wouldn't accidentally wreck a $200 piece of equipment)

Check out this link:
http://microscopes.toptenreviews.com/kids-microscope-review/

I agree re: microscopes. The other place to look for one is in university surplus sales and the labware 'E-bay' site (blanking on the name at the moment).

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features to look for in a microscope for a student at the middle and high school level? In particular, what's the minimum maximum magnification you'd recommend?

Well, it really isn't strictly about the magnification or the field of view-- but it IS, ultimately, about both of those things. High quality optics, basically. Those are what cost more, and they are unquestionably worth the price in most cases. A microscope buyer needs to consider many of the same things that a camera buyer does. Most "student" microscopes are frustratingly dim and narrow-field, making them difficult to use, to say the least.

Re: McGraw-Hill science books.

This is what my daughter used for science from grades 4-8. I would say that they were decent in terms of coverage, though hardly at the kind of pace or detail that gifted middle schoolers need. I'd certainly recommend them for PG 5-8 yo.

The 'experiments' were frequently nothing to write home about, though a competent adult 'guide' could easily make adjustments to make them educationally worthwhile even when things went wrong. There were quite a few embedded experiments, most intended for regular classroom use. They may need to be adapted for home use, but most do not require any special equipment or materials.

I still have a copy of the "red" book, which I believe was a 5th grade one. It has nice general coverage, about a third biological sciences, about half physics/chemistry, and the remainder earth science and astronomy (very basic, btw).

Coupled with a hand-held magnifier (I like the little telescoping pocket one from Lee Valley, myself), a basic rock kit, and some miscellaneous household devices, it's a pretty good textbook.

Recommended (as a science educator myself):

a BOUND composition book, preferably a journal style, for recording observations and making illustrations/schematics.

a starting discussion (the one shortcoming of the McGraw-Hill middle school series) of the scientific method and a bit of history there, with some emphasis and thought experiments on dependent/independent variables and good experimental design.

HTH!

You can check out beestar. My daughter has been using the GT math program. The worksheet are full of all real life world problems, challenging stuff to help kids thinking. I like the math program best. Beestar also has science program.
Lisa

E.D. Hirsch Jr. series called "What your X grader needs to know" gives a good general overview of what skills are usually taught in each grade level for all subjects. While it isn't necessarily useful when looking for challenging concepts, it will give you an idea of what schools are typically basing their progression on.

My third grader really enjoyed the Math for the Gifted Student workbooks (available from Amazon).

I really like the Let's Read and Find Out series. Janice Van Cleve's books are also great. She has a series that includes "Physics for Every Kid," "Chemistry for Every Kid," "Biology for Every Kid," "Earth Science for Every Kid," etc.

Thanks for all the help on science and microscopes. I'm buying these to try out:

AmScope 40x-1000x All-metal Student Cordless LED Field Biological Microscope $90

Celestron Digital Microscope Imager $42

The best thing about the microscope, the price, is also what's making me leery, but the AmScope microscopes all seem to get high user ratings on Amazon. I guess I'll find out if I'm a patsy, or if a decent home student microscope is really available for under a hundred dollars now.

ETA: I might get this cheap Celestron instead, for $119:
Celestron 44104 500x Power Advanced Biological Microscope

Homesciencetools has an elementary set of slides for like $11. My grandma gave me an old microscope. We havent really got into it yet, but we have pulled it out and looked through it. I didn't know how to get my son to look through it because he would close his eye when he got close. My dad fixed that in 2seconds flat. He put a piece of printed paper under the microscope, focused it, then asked my son, "what letter is that?". We've also started seeding a science notebook with pages of science terms. I ran some notebook paper through the printer and put different sized clip art of test tubes and scientists etc at the top of the pages. I put a few key words, flask, test tube, beaker on one page and my son copied them. That's one page. One page he colored a scientist print out. (he doesn't color much usually.). One page I cut whatever those little motors are called, alligator clip wires, battery packs, just a couple other things out of a catalog (I think it was homesciencetools catalog, I usually sign up for cool catalogs so I'm not sure.). I told him to draw a line down the center of the page and glue the picture in a row down one side then go to "the science box" and count how many of each piece he has and write the # in the other row. It's a 1" black binder from Walmart. It's going to take a while to fill up at this rate. I just want to show him some note taking and some vocabulary lists to reference later.