My 7 year old son will be taking the SCAT Thursday to see if he will qualify for CTY's online classes. Any experience with them?

My 12 year old son, who is homeschooled, has taken several CTY classes, and he has enjoyed them all. In particular, he loves their Arabic classes. (He wanted to learn another language and chose Arabic because he thought it looked beautiful and would present a significant challenge.) - I have heard, through this board and others, that you can get some of the same classes much cheaper through other communities. We've never explored this option, but it might be something to look into.

What other communities? We are going to try to get financial aid, otherwise I don't think we could do it anyway..

There are some folks on this site that know a lot more than me about this subject...I am hoping they'll see this and either correct me or weigh-in...

It is my understanding that Stanford and Johns Hopkins both use EPGY as their underlying math program for gifted children. I've seen posts on this site that seem to indicate you can get a group of students together and purchase this same program at a reduced rate. Johns Hopkins uses Plato for their introductory science courses. I don't know if the same holds true for Stanford and whether or not they too can be bulk purchased???

Although not geared towards gifted kids, a website I also like is Homeschool Buyers Co-op. They have some amazing deals. Recently, my son took a Designing Mods for Minecraft by Youth Digital class through HBC and he loved it.

Perhaps you can tell the board what your child is most interested in and members can make recommendations???

My son is interested in the CTYs middle school science courses as well as web design. I don't know if they will let him due to his young age. His scores were 98% verbal 99% math on the SCAT...

Science courses are Plato which can be had from the homeschool buyer's coop for much less. In general, "canned" courses that use material from other products are not worth the high price tag. Custom courses such as process of writing series or cryptography are excellent.

I just checked Plato at Homeschool Buyers Co-OP, and the science classes run $50 at 75% off.

I can't tell which are canned or not. How do you know

If you look at the course demo or screen shots, you can usually tell. They use Plato for science, think well for science and math, and EPGY for math too, I think.

Thank you! Kind of irritated, though, as they wont let him taking their web design courses because he's s young. Never mind that the prerequisite was completed fifth grade math and he is halfway through pre algebra...