Can we help with suggestions of things to offer? What kind of interest is she showing, and what have you made available already?
That would be lovely.
I know when she's thinking about math because either she asks me questions incessantly (E.g., "Mama, what's 3+3+3+3+3?" followed by "Mama, what's 3+3+3+3+3+3?" and so on) or because I hear her muttering things under her breath (E.g., "1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is...10"). Mostly what I do when I notice these things is that I try to introduce math games like seeing how many different ways we can make the number ten. She loves it for about ten minutes and then that's it and she won't want to play again.
In the past, I used to get her mathy books, which she seemed to love but lately it seems like all the math books are either too long & boring or too basic. That is counter-intuitive, because she reads at a much higher level than she does math, but books that deal with anything beyond counting or basic shapes tend to have long, boring storylines involving school. While she can read them easily enough, they're just not interesting to her. We did get one not too long ago that was good,
See Inside Math, but, though she did read it cover-to-cover several times I'm not sure how much she got out of it.
We also do math "tests" at her request once in a while, which, as I said earlier, don't usually go so well, and certainly don't last long. She has workbooks that her grandmother can't help buying, but I've never seen her bother with the math portion other than to practice writing numbers. In all fairness, I don't think she has anything past first grade that has math problems, so it's all pretty basic stuff.
In case I didn't make it clear earlier, she's the sort of kid who hates to be told what to do, which is why we initially adopted unschooling as our policy. She's really got her own ideas of what she's interested in, which is great, but in other areas she really communicates her needs to me, asks me questions, asks me to get her books, asks me to look things up for her, etc. But I feel like she just doesn't even want me to know what she's up to wrt math.
Perhaps she is embarrassed that it's obvious that she's not as good at it as DH & I are. She does tend toward perfectionism, but for the most part we've managed to address that before it became an issue.
I guess y'all are right that testing now isn't going to answer this question for me.
