What did week 20 finish with? I have older versions so mine might work

Oh wow - only October! I was just looking at this yesterday and updating a link on a blog post I wrote about math contest. Now I will go back and put the link you shared in. We do it as part of our homeschool group and the kids like to see who does the best our of our group. The last time they had the American Math Challenge we actually had a student on the leaderboard and our "school" came in the 30s overall I think. My daughter only really liked the Science one. I think the "jeopardy" style way it was done was cool.

Posted twice by mistake ... but remembered another one: Thinkfun has a game called Chocolate Fix which you can buy - but you can also make your own. Here is the link to the pdf: http://mathcounts.org/sites/default/files/u49/ThinkFun.Chocolate.Fix.2011-12.pdf

I reviewed 3 Math games that I don't think anyone has mentioned yet in a post I did on Math Club resources: http://fundafunda.com/blog/math-club-resources.html Scroll down to number 2. Of those, 24 is probably my kids' favorite. When I was a kid in S Africa Kellogs posted 24 problems on the cereal boxes and we LOVED them.

My younger son loved Artemis Fowl. He also read quite a bit of Jules Verne. But that was in 11th/12th grade.

The NY Times has a cool contest for 13-19 year olds. From mid June to mid Aug they can submit their response to any news article they read in the NY Times for a chance to win a prize that week. They can't write more than 350 words so even my lazy daughter figured it was do-able :) Here's the link: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/our-fifth-annual-new-york-times-summer-reading-contest/

If you use Singapore and just want to buy one book, you can get the Extra Practice Problems or Challenging Problems. This assumes they have covered the work and just need more practice. Otherwise you need the textbook and workbook. Have you considered rather using Khan Academy? The gamification of the website makes it fun for students - especially if they are having to do math in the vacation. And I tie the number of points earned to real rewards to add extra motivation. A few of my friends have started doing that too and it is working well for all of us. And of course Khan is free which is a nice bonus.

I really enjoyed all Stephen Lawhead's books - some are fantasy, some science fiction and some historical fiction. One of the series is aimed at teens, but all would be appropriate for your children. My favorite with the ones based on Arthurian legend. And CS Lewis's science fiction trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength) are 3 others they should enjoy.

I think that wouldn't be an ideal spine for a slow reader - but you could just omit it entirely as the lectures do cover a lot. My course is very rigorous ie for those looking for something less rigorous - just take the harder stuff out. It is not a hard book to read ... we tried the Penguin US History first (my older son used that - Collegeboard had it listed as one that doesn't read like a textbook) but he found it incredibly dull. Which is when I remembered reading Paul Johnson about 20 years ago for fun ... and so I put that in instead. If you are looking for a course that will prepare them well for college - then they will have to learn to read books that are much harder the the Paul Johnson book. Obviously for a student in 9th / 10th grade one isn't looking for the same thing as for an 11th /12th grader who has college just round the corner. I give an example of an essay but I don't go through and list points for each different one. That is something I could do if people wanted it - I would need to charge a bit for that version ($9.95 probably) but I like history and would be up for doing that if it is something people ask for. As I know history fairly well, I just read their essays and could easily point out major things they had forgotten. But I understand not every parent may have enough knowledge to adequately grade

Teaching Textbooks might work. It is a bit on the easy side so if she wants to to well on standardized tests in math, this isn't an ideal option - but it does explain things well, has DVDs for instruction and I am sure she will manage fine working through them herself. My 2nd son liked TT but I had to find something harder when he wasn't scoring well enough on the SAT / ACT but if you are playing catch up and want something manageable, this might work well.

Here is my course: http://fundafunda.com/products/ushistory.pdf . I eventually wrote it up as a few friends used it as well. I do give the essays I used out of the guide. I didn't use the You Decide books and only the pertinent parts of the Critical Thinking ones as it would have been too much otherwise. The books are listed in the pdf but I can remember some were Lies my Teacher told me and Up from Slavery. I also include many of the other movies my boys watched. They didn't watch all of them as some they had already watched in previous years. For many people my course is more rigorous than what they want - but then you just leave some out. I developed it as mine had done the Sonlight US History as 8th graders and I needed something for them.

Here is a link to the course I developed: http://fundafunda.com/products/ushistory.pdf I did tell them to take notes. They sort of did. They are boys! And one of them has an amazing ability to remember things.

I used The Great Courses US Hstory DVD course as the "spine" for my boys who both scored 5s on the AP exam so CLEP shouldn't be a problem. I did make the write an essay per week (suggested in the guide) and there are no quizzes or anything like that as it is a college level course. There are 84 1/2 lectures. They used to watch 3 a week. I supplemented it with other DVDs and Critical Thinking through US history (which does have exercise for students to do - but you have to grade unfortunately). And I added in Sonlight books from the Civics and Govt core as they had no trouble with reading but you could obviously leave the extras out. There are lots of good DVD series that flesh out US History (eg John Adams) and so you can consider using DVDs instead of books to get around the reading issue

I teach online programming classes and have a number of students as young as 9 doing Scratch. I have also taught Alice. It is harder to learn than Scratch - but you can do more with it. Be careful of Tynker. Not much of it is free and it is VERY glitchy. I used it in an Intro to Programming class and it was a disaster as it doesn't work well on older computers or Firefox. It is just a spin off of Scratch, so rather stick with Scratch For program logic, that is a hard one, but there are games and apps that get kids thinking the right way. Try http://learn.code.org/hoc/1 - this is code.orgs puzzle game Apps: Lightbot (also can play on computer) and CargoBot are two good ones.

Loved the book too and I would agree 10th - 12th. I don't think younger will appreciate it. Must remember to get my youngest to read it in a few years time.

Sorry I took so long to respond - been a crazy few days. It's https://www.udacity.com/. And no, I wouldn't recommend it for an 8th grader who isn't interested in science. It is a college level class and does have some trigonometry in it (my daughter thought it was cool - I only realized this was in the course when she got a trig question correct in a science bowl). I would never have suggested this course to my oldest daughter who is much more interested in the humanities. But my youngest was bored with Apologia so I thought maybe something more challenging would be better - and she has really liked this class.

I took 2 Coursera classes last semester - one on Python through Univ of Toronto and one on e-Learning through UC Irvine. The Python one I think would be very confusing to anyone who didn't already know how to program. I took it to see how they taught the subject - but unfortunately only learned how not to. The e-Learning one was more useful thought the delivery was boring. On the other hand my 8th grader has been working through Udacity's History of Science and she LOVES it. It also proved useful in Science Bowl last weekend - as a result of what she had learned she even managed to answer a trig question correctly. It is also useful to her in Science Olympiad. She says sometimes she has to rewatch videos if her mind wanders but she really enjoys doing it.

I remember discovering this fact as a teen .... needless to say it is one of the things I didn't forget!

The short version is that many colleges do not acccept CLEP. I think of all the colleges (about 30) my oldest 3 children applied to - only one accepted CLEP. Almost every college accepts APs, but most do not accept every AP that one can take (for instance - very few seem to accept the Human Geography). The majority do accept the more popular ones (the 2 English exams, the science ones, the languages , the histories) and they have got my kids as much as 8 credit units each (again each college has different rules). If you don't know where your child wants to attend college, and they will be able to cope with AP exams - then that is your safest bet. However, if you do know where they want to go and that college accepts CLEP - then that is the cheaper and easier route.

For those of you who have used codeacademy - I am interested to know if by the end your children could write whole programs by themselves. I tried it out - but as I already knew how to program I couldn't tell how easy it would be to "go it alone" afterwards. The method of teaching is quite different and I have been intrigued to know if it would work. I also tried a Coursera course and felt that that one started at an odd place without laying any foundation (this is not an issue with codeacademy). I have been teaching live programming classes and am just now transitioning to online ones and trying to work out what works and what doesn't.

Duplicate of above post ...

Just one thing about Codeacademy - I wouldn't suggest learning Python through it - they are still on the old version of Python (Python 2.7) while the latest is 3.3 and there are quite a few differences in syntax. I don't have experience with the rest of the languages they cover, but I wouldn't use them to learn Python

The Scratch course costs - but the Intro to Programming is free - I said that I teach a Scratch class - and then I said I also have a free class ie I offer 2 programming classes - one free and one paid. Sorry if what I said was confusing. The free one is just 4 weeks and is a general Intro to Programming. Hopefully that makes it clearer.

These look awesome. My 6th grade nephew LOVES minecraft. I think these classes would be great for upper elementary / middle schoolers. Boys particularly like Minecraft. It is very educational (and fun) even without the added aspects offered by these classes. I must say, if I had a son that age I would try out one of these classes - at the price it wouldn't be a huge risk. Minecraft is an online game so if you have problems letting your kids play in online environments then that could be a problem, but the people running these classes operate their own servers and I saw on their website they have a list of rules so this is about as good as it will get online.