Life of Fred perhaps? I would suggest AoPS as choice #1 and LoF as choice #2. Good luck to your friend!

I've been wondering how to say this. On the one hand, I agree that the other poster was unnecessarily harsh. I've frequented that board often in the past and must say I too reacted negatively at first to every post including a reference to a blog written by the OP. However, I could see she was a new member and not familiar with the culture of the board. I prefered to give her the benefit of the doubt as I myself have been remiss with understanding how boards work in the past and am not immune to mistakes. It was highly unfortunate that the other poster chose to express his/ her opinion in the way he/ she did. But I've also read posts by that poster that have been extremely sensible and more importantly, very welcoming and helpful to new members. I am sorry that the OP's feelings were hurt though. It's indeed sad that it happened this way. On the other hand, I don't know if it's also right on the OP's part to bring it to public attention like this on another board. It may have been a lot more helpful to bring it to the attention of the forum's moderator than to air grievances on another forum. It just doesn't feel right to me. It makes others judge the board based on one person's experience and does others a disservice IMHO. There's so much more to the Davidson public forum than this one incident. I don't wish to offend anyone by writing this but sincerely feel that if you are really stuck at a crossroads homeschooling/ afterschooling/ public/ private schooling your child and if your child shows to have needs that just cannot be addressed in a general education forum, you're going to need all the support you can get. Even if you join the DYS program eventually and subscribe to the elists, this public forum contains a wealth of information and support from experienced parents that cannot be replicated by the other elists. FWIW, I've been flamed on other lists too and understand the hurt involved.

Placement tests as the previous poster said might be helpful but I would suggest just leaving academics out of the picture for a few weeks (esp since you are new to it) and observing him at what he likes to do best. If he likes math, what kind of math does he choose to do of his own free will? This is a good time to strew about a few higher and on-grade level books in his room or on your coffeetable to see which ones he gravitates towards (or go to the library to see which ones he likes). I'd then choose a grade level that's about one level higher to challenge and keep him interested. But be prepared to have him breeze through the material in *much* less than a year, let alone a couple of months. :) Try similar strategies for other subjects too. A little observation and trial and error will probably work well. It's a lot like the scientific method homeschooling...you'll be questioning, researching, predicting and experimenting a lot for as long as you plan to do it. :) Good luck!

Heisenberg Probably Slept Here The Physics of Christmas Napoleon's Buttons Cats Are Not Peas The 'frequently bought together' and 'customers who bought this also bought' sections will give you some ideas too! HTH!

We're not doing it for credit either. It's all for fun right now. :001_smile: I've sent you a PM naturalmom!

And I forgot to mention: you can view The Mechanical Universe videos for free. Someone mentioned a text to go with it but I haven't checked that out yet. Just another thought for you!

This sounds very similar to my plan only that mine is finishing Alg 1 and will move on to Geometry while also taking the online AoPS Number Theory class. For Geometry, I'm planning on using the Jurgensen/Brown textbook with the solutions key. We're also hoping to keep time aside for German and lots of reading and playing on the side with math. :) We began high school science last year using a tutor/ mentor. A small group of us parents and kids meet every 2-3 weeks with the mentor and discuss high school to intro college level topics using various science textbooks and youtube videos. We plan science labs around the videos and other topics of interest. The only diff is that mine is crazy about Chemistry so the labs have all been Chemistry labs so far. This year, I hope to use Conceptual Physics and I also have the Conceptual Integrated Science textbook that someone here suggested as a basic spine to tie together with a physics kit and a chemistry kit I bought. Here's a question I asked on the high school board. I received very helpful answers. I think it depends on the kid. If you have a very interested learner, there's no harm trying IMHO. You can always work around it, tweaking as you go. Here's my rough schedule for doing this. I plan to dedicate one day just for science as my guy gets very intense and doesn't like to jump to something else once he's all excited about something. 3 days a week: Number Theory, Geometry and German. Some assigned reading and writing. 1 day: Outside classes (piano, PE etc) and Science (incl, science videos, reading and discussing the textbook and doing projects/ labs) 1 day: our small group learning day He reads science/ math books and other fiction, non-fiction a lot so this is not scheduled. All the best!

The standards are there to aid school teachers with general benchmarks for school-kids, so it really doesn't befit the home-learning environment where you have more time and flexibility to customize your child(ren)'s education. If you plan to homeschool using a homeschool charter like we do, and if you are new to homeschooling, I can see the anxiety about following standards. I was in that situation when we began homeschooling and having just moved from another country, used to wonder why on earth my charter school teacher was asking me to follow a list of preposterous standards. We happily left those standards behind with no detrimental effects whatsoever. We naturally meet or exceed standards and even when we don't, it doesn't take more than a day or two to "catch up" (we only try to catch up if I think it will benefit my guy in some way). As only a "budding" fan of Escher, I had to google your sig. :001_smile: Lovely!

Like others said, keep doing what you're doing and maybe add a brain-bending challenge, like a foreign language, or math olympiad questions (the questions start off with just enough challenge for a mathy 7yo). If you can afford it, music lessons. Something like piano to help strengthen those finger muscles. When my son was 7 and advanced but not ahead in motor skills, I invested in a TOPS science guide (e.g. perfect balance) to help him pursue his love for math and science using paper-based manipulatives he could make himself with minimal help from me. The confidence boost was priceless and TOPS is affordable too. Perfectionism rears it head in our home very often and I've learned to console him but not let him give up. It helps to pull up an example of a time when he felt he couldn't do it but persevered and accomplished something well. Break it down into baby steps if you need to. Good luck!

That board has been a lifesaver for me in many ways. It's the only place where I've been able to be absolutely honest about my journey with my son. I have seen a handful of discussions getting heated with the moderator having to step in to end them. Compared to other forums I read though, it's not as common IMHO.

My son was researching this a while back. Here is a link that may help explain it. This a good forum to ask questions. This one too.

Here's the kit that goes with the book (or so I was told). :)

FWIW, you're not alone in feeling this. And I don't think it's vain. Possibly, unnecessary if you're going to be homeschooling and read your child well and are able to customize, enrich, accelerate appropriately. But good to test if you need much more than that, if your child is significantly diff from the norm and showing it, very voriacious in appetite to learn that you suspect he/she will outstrip your ability in teaching/ guiding very soon and/or if you tend to second guess all the decisions you make and the second guessing is stressing you out. Personality of parent/child counts for a lot also. But I think the need to know can be very strong and finding out in the end will be more helpful than most realize. I don't think the Peabody will help give you more complete answers though. Like Sevilla, I'd suggest waiting till the child is at least 7, but preferably not older than 8 and a half.

Earlier in the thread, I included a link to another message board where parents mentioned Ruf's book being a lot clearer and detailed than the snippets available on the web. I feel that I already know enough at this juncture and don't require the book but anyone reading this who is just starting out researching giftedness might benefit from reading it. If you don't plan to have your child take an IQ test now but think your child fits Ruf's levels 3/4/5, the next step may be to try to get your hands on Miraca Gross' book. I don't think it's ever too early to research all this. As long as you have your feet set firmly on the ground, that is.

Very, very helpful! Thank you! I might start another thread based on this description. After I read and re-read it several times to digest it. LOL. Thanks again!

Ask for percentile if available. Depending on the test, giftedness would probably fall in the 95% + range. Another guess.

I'm sorry you feel this way. I think the problem is not that your question wasn't simple and direct but that it's difficult to offer a simple, direct answer to a question like this one. Researching giftedness has become a passion for me and I have to say that I just cannot trust Ruf's levels because there's just too much room for ambiguity. I haven't met a single person who falls squarely into a level without significant overlaps. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why you are not able to get a direct answer to this. Take for instance, some of the thoughts in this thread: http://www.mothering.com/community/forum/thread/1127915/ruf-s-levels-of-giftedness/20 (I just googled Ruf level 2 vocabulary to find this. You should be able to keyword search on google and get other hits too). Don't know if this is helpful in any way. Take care!

The best part of this plan is that we could "repeat" 7th/8th grade for a couple more years at least and enrich it with all the research and independent study he wants to do. You're right...theoretically, I don't need to think about high school for several more years so why freak out now. I would love some advice though on when you felt you "should" declare it 9th grade. He's already reading and discussing in a lot of depth and we have been increasingly adding more and more high school level books to read without even realizing it sometimes so it would be helpful to have some sort of a milestone to look for. Will I just "know"? :) We've survived thus far on pure instinct (and my late night lurking on this board) so perhaps that gut feel is what I should look for? I already have that gut feeling for math. But am not sure if it's entirely the right time for other areas. At this point, I still don't plan to graduate him early...but I don't think I can reliably predict what's going to happen so far ahead either. He loves AoPS! I see him thriving even more after we turned to more outside/ online classes this year. This definitely helps! Thanks so very much! BTW, just wanted to ensure that The Cosmos you've all been refering to is this book. The Filippenko course I've planned for 2012/13 is this one. Same ones? :001_smile:

All fabulous points. The boy loves Filipenko and has watched oodles of Nova videos featuring the good prof. We've even attended one of his live talks. I was saving the TC course for next year so it's good to know others have done it (I'll probably be asking questions about that next year!). Yes, he has to have a purpose to write and most writing curricula don't work for him because he hasn't felt the pull to produce as the curricula demands it. Even if I tweak writing curriculum, it's usually a miss more than a hit. So my thought was to integrate writing with math instead. He is dabbling in his own number theory research. I am taking a leaf from Sal Khan's (of Khan Academy) book and asking him to organize his thoughts and notes in paragraphs so that his research will be easy enough for the average 6 or 7-year-old to understand. Perhaps we'll move on to number theory youtube videos next lol. I could ask him to write a script for a video too. Maybe that would work. Using science to write is also a great idea. I have to think about how to make it purposeful enough. I might use chemistry as a springboard for that since he loves it the most. I also wonder if the Python course he plans to do will help with writing. He has to write simple programs for simple games. Perhaps the writing exercise could involve asking him to describe a basic game he could program using Python? You're giving me great ideas. Thank you again!

Extremely valid point! I have a feeling this may be what I'll end up doing too. Excellent idea. I'm going to try to see if I can get my hands on a CIS book in our homeschool group or some samples from somewhere...I would love to have one unifying book to pull it altogether. One of the reasons I'm nervous about my plan is that there are so many books here and there and it will likely work better if we can have one major spine to wrap it together. He loves astronomy too so CIS sounds wonderful in that respect. Thanks a bunch!

Can you tell I'm re-reading your message again and again? 8FillTheHeart or anyone else reading this and able to offer suggestions, Would you say I could call it Physical Science for the physics and chemistry and Life Sciences for the biology labs? The physical sciences and biology he did before this were mostly through outside classes or unschooled and then we pursued testing and he aced two eighth-grade nationally standardized tests (we are not full unschoolers but he does so much on his own for science and math that we pursued this route for verification / documentation that he'd worked hard enough to be considered a junior high student last year, otherwise, it would have been difficult to prove the unschooled learning). By doing so (callling the 2 courses PS and LS), could I include the information as Pre-HS in his transcript/ course descriptions? We don't plan to graduate him early either. It looks as if he will take 2 science and 2 math courses for most of his high school education. I really do wish I'd been a science or math major myself. Not sure how we'll deal with this. :willy_nilly:

First, I'm so grateful no one thinks I'm crazy (so far!) because I surely do. :001_smile:. I have been planning this forever (what feels like it) in my head but after typing it out yesterday, I'm convinced I'm going to go batty. Oh well... I didn't know that! Thank you so much. It may make life easier for us down the road. Thank you so much for your kind message. Mine won't do it with live animals and it's helpful that we are buying preserved specimens. He was horrified to hear that when I did labs in high school, we used live frogs, earthworms, fish etc. I wanted to thank you 8FillTheHeart for every single word you wrote. I didn't mention his age on purpose. I have encountered flaming/ harsh judgement before (other forums) for saying how old he is and I don't want to face that again nor do I want to start a debate. I'm trying my best to work with this kid at his level while balancing all his other socioemotional needs so I don't need online judgement too kwim? His workload is constantly on my mind so it came as a relief that I was able to let English and Social Studies go and not have to plan for those too. Thank you! Oh this is wonderful! I now have plenty of good ideas for stretching it out and including resources as he becomes ready for them developmentally as well. You know I was quite nervous to ask my question but am really glad now that I did. :001_smile:

Hello all, I have a younger-than-high-school-age child. Our family had initially discussed that he will begin 9th grade this year, having completed 8th grade level in math and science and foreign language electives this previous year. He shows great maturity for his age so we thought it would be a good time to begin... However, he has now told us that he does not want to begin "9th grade across the board". Meaning that he would like a break from English and Social Studies and spend the coming year focusing on his passion for math research and also hands-on science labs. I now agree with him because although he is a mature boy, I don't think he has the skill needed for writing at high school level. His writing is good enough for his age, but not what I'd like it to be if he was starting 9th grade. So delaying another year sounds like a good idea to help him catch up developmentally. We seem all set for math. However, I'm at a bit of a dilemma because I couldn't find a course that would fulfill his passion for integrated lab sciences (he wants a 3-in-1) so I decided to "create" one myself using resources we already have at home. After reading the course description below, I would love to know: 1. Will this prepare him well for high school level science in the coming years? 2. Could I call it 9th grade science after all? e.g. integrated physical science or maybe integrated lab science? We homeschool through a charter school and they like to know these things. Course descriptions: Physics: We have the most advanced level kit from Exploration Education (which is about junior high level) plus this high school physics kit from Home Science Tools. I will likely line up the projects he wants to do with appropriate readings from Conceptual Physics 10th ed (I have an account for him to view their videos as well), and videos from The Mechanical Universe. There will probably be a higher frequency of audiovisual components than reading a textbook for now. He will read excerpts of his choice from various mass market physics books (I only choose highly reviewed ones). Chemistry: We just bought the ChemC3000 kit (thanks LunaLee!) and will work through the manual together. He has been involved in a small discussion group with some friends, using a very highly-experienced mentor as facilitator for a few weeks now and is enjoying it very much. According to the mentor, they discuss anything from high school to freshman college level chemistry. He has read a large number of junior high and high-school level mass market chemistry books over the past year. I also have the Teaching Company high school chemistry course for him to watch at home. He will complete Algebra I with an A+ at the end of summer and should be ready for the required math. We will take our time with chemistry because he will most probably want to stretch it out and redo labs and rewatch videos etc because of his passion for the subject. Biology: He has taken about half of a what you could call "AP level" Biology course. He audited the course with his dad and scored at least 80% for each test so he has some good background info. But he dropped it after a while, switching to reading "living" books and researching online. So for Biology, he won't be doing textbook style work in the fall. He will focus on hands-on dissections the most as that's what he really wants to do. If the dissections are a success, he will very likely want to read up and research more but for now, it's dissections first. I was thinking of using Blood and Guts by Linda Allison as a spine for the dissections but am open to ideas (secular please!). I couldn't find any other book that laid it out clearly without too much technical info. He's very much the big picture guy who will look for the finer details once his interest is piqued. He will also be playing with the microscope, preparing slides etc. I would eventually like for him to seamlessly flow into more rigorous high school science, including APs, but am not sure if he's prepping well-enough for it with this cobbled together lab science course. He really would like a mix of the sciences this year and I don't want to have to say "you have to wait till you're doing each science on its own in high school" kwim? He's passionate about it so I know he will be a good student. Apart from math and science, he will have German as an elective and will be exploring Python programming. He devours books in his free time, historical lit included, so I'm not too worried about English and History being "left aside". Thank you for listening/ reading! I'm so sorry this is so long. I have no experience doing this so it feels scary :svengo:I feel as if I need to explain it in detail so y'all will know what I'm trying to achieve.

I administered standardized tests at home to help me make curriculum and acceleration decisions. My DS showed resistance towards some of the grade-level curriculum so choosing a significantly higher than grade level test helped me craft a more customized education for him. I also recently paid for the Explore test to be administered privately (through the Belin-Blank Center). I was educated in another country and therefore, am not entirely familiar with the system here. The tests helped make the expectations of this system clearer to me. I similarly didn't feel he needed an IQ test. However when he turned 8, he showed obvious leaps in learning ability and understanding that clearly befuddled me. I managed to get testing done for very cheap at our local university's psychology department. The results might not be accurate (and I realize not many tests are) since he was tested by an intern but it was enough of a ballpark figure to make me re-customize his educational path to one he's more happy with and excited about.