Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Where can I find GT Math & Science Curriculum?

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.