They have good documentation on their website. So, if you have time, I recommend that you help your child initially by going through the video tutorials on their website - until the book is updated and matches the newly released version. There are several tutorial type help items available at http://scratch.mit.edu/help/ and it is very easy for a parent or a mentor to use those to teach a young child how to use scratch.

Wow. Heigh Ho, I am so happy that my child is still in elementary school after reading this post. In my state (Cal) the top few percentile of students from each public high school can get admitted to state colleges (some of them are highly coveted) - so I have heard (anecdotally, from coworkers) that there is a lot of one-upmanship, knocking off competitors by fair or foul means, copying what the top students do blindly etc at that level. I was not even aware that these type of parents advocate for cutting courses that highly gifted students are good at :( You opened my eyes to another ugly side of competitive parenting - something more for me to think/worry about in the years to come :ohmy:

Thanks for all the comments. It is interesting to see all the different takes on my posts. My vent is about parents, and definitely not about the poor kids involved. I volunteer to teach for 3 hours every week in my local PS (despite working and afterschooling and all else going on in my life) - and I work with kids that are not my own during that time, so I am not aggressively pursuing and competing for the betterment of just my child :) SKL, I am filling in the blank for you ... "I don't want to tell you what my kids are doing this summer because your kid does not like music theory and cannot play basketball all day long, so I don't want you to make your child unhappy by putting him in music composition camp and all day basketball camps (in 100 degree weather too) just because I did it. I want you to do what needs to be done for your child, not make him follow my child around everywhere. It is unproductive and unhealthy for your child!". As you said, there are so many options out there, why not do some thinking, research, calling around and figuring what those options are? And, why not ask their own kid what camps they would love to go to for summer, that would be a nice change.

I was a slowpoke when in school. I was the very last at doing things at school. For me the reason was because I could not work well if I did not have a tracking system and I was very bored and the schooling material was not challenging me enough so I was spending time daydreaming than paying attention. What worked was to set up a system to track me (I had to figure this one out by myself), being timed on my tasks and being grade skipped a level at school. The grade skip helped because, suddenly I had to pay more attention because things were not very easy and I had to get involved in class. And timing the tasks worked because I became accountable for my work. My guess is that your child is gifted in some areas and needs more challenges. And it would help if you set up a system for him to track and time him: for example, make a spreadsheet and put it up in front of him every day (get his help in making it, if needed): Thursday Schedule 8:00 AM- 8:40AM - geometry 8:45AM- 9:30 AM - history - notetaking etc 9:35 AM - 10:30 AM - Science chapter 5 10:35 AM - 11:20 AM - Orthodontist visit 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM - Lunch hour 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM - Geometry 1:15 PM - 3:00 PM - Sport #1 3:00 PM - 3:20 PM - Snack time 3:20 PM - 4:00 PM - Music practice ... etc When you list out things like that it also makes it easier to track which subjects are slower than the others and do more tweaking of the teaching methods or spend more time on it. Good luck.

Thanks for all your responses. It was just a vent because I was feeling a little hunted today on the sidewalk with a few of the neighborhood tiger mom wannabes giving me the third degree. As I said, I need to keep my wits around me to be vague or snarky or witty - so I need some practice time. I love the consultant + coffee wage idea, especially if I could consult by email. I might actually point them to TWTM website and let them explore on their own. Bill, I do agree with you. As I said earlier, I am too earnest a person and am used to oversharing any and all info/ideas that I have regarding a child's academic and overall development. There are nice parents who are genuinely looking for help for their kids and then there are the parents whose only purpose is to compare. Comparison is bad and when done openly and not in a nice way, it kills a small child's self confidence. Every child is unique and not all of them have to work on accelerated academics or extra curriculars because someone else decided to go that way for their kids. It gets ridiculous and even a little sad when little Johnny is compared with little Timmy just to make sure that little Johnny never missed a single item on the checklist of accelerated academics and accelerated extra curriculars. Case in point, poor Johnny was led kicking and screaming to a weekly 45 minute private piano lesson and a monthly 30 minute master piano class just because little Timmy's mom takes him to them. Poor Johnny excels at T-ball and would rather be practicing at the ballpark and would like to never see a piano for the rest of his life! Another case in point is when someone asks what kind of math "drilling curriculum" do you use to make little Timmy solve 30 mental math problems in under 8 minutes while little Johnny cannot finish all of them - this info was gleaned by the asker by giving little Johnny the 3rd degree at home! These are the parents that I cannot deal with ...

OP, forgot to add - I love the C Rod organizer tray and the C Rod centimeter track I bought 2 years ago from RR. They are nifty and bought them to make my order reach free shipping limit. You don't need them, but they are cool to have and my DS loves both of them - he especially used to dump out the rods and sort and organize them in the tray as a game when he was 3 years old.

Thanks for this great response! I am off to work up some scripts :) I especially love "anything that looks like it will fill in the gaps" - I am too earnest and take every question at face value and try to answer it to the best of my knowledge. "Vague" will take some quick thinking on my feet and habit training, but I will work on it!

My area is filled with tiger parent wannabes. They are from families with both working parents, multiple kids and no time to monitor or stimulate their kids after school. So, their shortest path to afterschooling is to interrogate parents they perceive as having good ideas about their child's development and then imitating them without any research or desire on their part to follow those paths. I am especially plagued by a few of these families who make a beeline for me at pick up and drop off times every single day (cannot avoid them even if I wanted to) and start asking questions about what curriculum I follow for science, math, music and what my child's accomplishment is in each sport that he participates in, what camps my child would attend in summer, what museums I take my child to etc. And lo and behold, they are doing the exact same thing a few weeks later (and would you know it, they thought of these bright ideas all by themselves!). I don't mind sharing the info as I am happy when another child benefits from my research. But, I am an introvert and really do not want to incessantly answer volleys of questions about my choices while standing on a sidewalk. How do I avoid them? Our school does not have a parking lot and I need to walk to pick up and drop off my child - hence the daily interaction with people I would rather not deal with.

I have ordered several times this year with their free shipping for orders over $50 option - you can see it on their homepage. Other than that, I don't remember that they had a summer sale in the past couple of years. CBD has a summer sale, though and I have made use of it for curriculum purchases.

It is perfectly normal for a preteen to think that social interaction with kids who have not been handpicked by their parents (which happens a lot when being homeschooled) is desirable. It is also normal for said child to be jealous of other kids having a more conventional education system (especially if they hang out on facebook and instagram and twitter as the OP stated). This thread is about the parents enforcing their educational choices on a child who is approaching her teens and wanting to try other things. My advise to the OP is that even though how to educate their child is the parent's decision, she and her DH need to think if this is the battle they want to fight with their daughter. Because your relationship with your daughter should not suffer and a lifelong resentment should not fester in your daughter's mind because of being "forced" to be homeschooled (which is how she is feeling right now). If you think that your family unit is going to be OK even though a teen lives amongst you thinking that she has no say in what is most important to her right now and that the issue is closed once and for all and things will be back to normal, then your decision will work well. If you think that this will lead to future behavior problems, acting out, rebellion, strained relationships etc, you need to talk more about this with your DH. I am not saying if your decision is correct or not (it is not anybody else's call, only you can make the decision). I am just saying that you need to find how the homeschooling dynamics will work now that the child does not desire homeschooling. Good luck.

Could you please let us know what Mathletics is? Is it like a competition or is it a training program?

Thank you all so much! So many resources to check out...

Asking for a friend of mine: She is looking to buy a Tangram set and a Tangram puzzle book for an almost 6 yo boy. First of all, is it too late to buy these for a bright 6 year old? She is worried that they might be really simple at this stage. If they are still a viable choice, are there any good and "sturdy" sets that anyone can recommend (some links would help a lot) - this child is highly destructive and has been known to destroy toys in minutes. The idea is to make him sit still and try to solve puzzles using his creativity for atleast 10 minutes at a time - this is when he spends time with his elderly grandparents when they do not have energy to handle him. His mother specifically wants to try Tangrams. He plays Sudoku and Chess (though the chess pieces are glued together with superglue these days because he tried to perform surgery on them!). Thanks for your help.

I always add games like Spot It!, Perplexus, Q-Bitz, Qwirkle etc to my order. And I pick some Dover coloring and activity books that thematically go with the topics we are currently covering (Sharks, Dinosaurs, Peter Rabbit, American Rvolution etc come to mind). And then, I buy some really fun stuff like smencils, crossover pencil grips, triangular pencils/triangular color pencils etc just because I like them! I love these RR threads!

I have a Tiger Kid too who wants to do school work even when he is sick and running a temperature. Oddly, his enthusiasm is equally distributed towards academics, extra curriculars and arts. We are on the go all the time or learning all the time. He might take a 10 minute break sometimes and then be back craving stimulation and something to keep him busy. I sometimes feel that so much learning going on in his life might not be a good thing and I enforce "quiet periods" or just simple things like riding a bike and a walk to the park in order to reduce the intensity. And yes, you struck a chord when you talked about "high maintenance and exhausting". I sure am exhausted! ETA: On further thought, why not call the child a "Tiger Cub" :) ??

I gave up pre-reading when the number of books read per month started going up astronomically. I just do not have the time to do it. So, I rely heavily on reviews, friend recommendations and I stop by the desk of our local librarian once a month and ask for referrals to good reads. The good thing about my child is that when/if the content gets scary or troubling (some non-fiction books talking about sharks, meteors, earthquakes etc seem to terrify him) he is very good at putting that book away and informing me to stop giving him such books. We either try to talk about that topic or put it away to revisit at a later time.

Thanks for all your help. My child's audition today turned out to be super easy and zero stress. The judge was a very experienced player who teaches at a prestigious music college and has performed at Carnegie hall and released her own album while my son was playing pieces in the "elementary" category which made me wonder if she might have very high standards. The judge turned out to be very nice and said some very encouraging things to my son (I could hear dim voices through the glass walls of the performance rooms and could make out some words). When the judge walked out of the building, she spotted my child and came up and said that he did a great job. We are awaiting the report card, but I wanted to say that I love this kind of low stress "auditions" with super nice judges than the high pressure competitions and recitals.

In my child's preschool, they made simple musical instruments all the time: 1. Shakers made with paper plates - decorate the plate, fold into two and fill it with dry beans and staple them 2. tambourine from a decorated paper plate - punch holes on the edges of the paper plate, string some christmas bells on them. 3. Coffe can drum - the kids painted the sides of an empty coffee can tin, decorated it with beads and stickers. Then they stuck felt on the lid of the can, made drum sticks with wooden dowels. We still have this drum at home even a few years later. 4. Tissue box guitars - using rubber bands. If you google these terms, there are tons of pictorials out there. Some TV channels like Nick Jr and Sprout have these type of musical instrument crafts on their website too. Hope this helps.

You have the right ideas - making the child walk through the solution with a teacher/coach helps solidify the knowledge as well as reinforces the concepts already learned. What works for me is to make it a game for my DS. We pick 3 problems at a time and I become the student who lacks understanding of concepts and my child becomes the teacher. The child then "teaches" me how to solve those 3 problems. I throw in a mix of thoughtful, funny, weird questions to the "teacher" to keep it interesting and let him explain his thought process and also make him think about several "what ifs". One thing I noticed is that though my child is happy to teach me, his vocabulary and ability to explain clearly and logically is highly lacking - we were doing "consecutive odd numbers" yesterday and he got really frustrated because the words and thoughts were not flowing freely. I had to supply all the vocabulary and then aid in the explanation. Until then he refused to explain the solution to me. So, what you are facing could well be a lack of fluency of words and thoughts, in which case, you could prompt frequently and supply the sentences needed to complete each thought.

Looks like I have quite a few links to research because of you guys sharing these here! Thanks a lot!

I use SM as the main spine for my child. But, I have read in several places over the years about how the philosophy of SM is from Singapore and China's adoption of Russian Math methods from several decades ago. I would love to get hold of some Russian Math books at the elementary level for the purpose of reading and educating myself so that I can understand the thinking, the approach and reasoning behind it. I am hoping that it would make me a better educator to my child. But, I am unable to go to any website, click on a "buy" button and get a book delivered to me! They are so elusive. One would think that with so many people looking for choices, there is bound to be at least one publisher in the Western hemisphere who has a reasonably good series in English which people are willing to buy and learn from. If there is something out there that teaches Russian Math to elementary kids, I would love to know about it. BTW/ I visited a Russian Math tutoring center in my neighborhood and they claim that the "Russian" component to their math is the "mastery" approach rather than from any particular textbook/curriculum and that they use a combination of 6 different curriculum (all of them range from SM to Saxon to Right start to Everyday math - all published in America by non-Russians) and tutor their students to achieve "mastery" in topics before moving on to the next - well, they were from Belarus, so they really are from the Russian education system. Which still leaves me looking for an authentic Russian Math curriculum in English.

If you have a good music academy in your area, they might offer group piano lessons for the 3-4 year old set. They use fun and creative methods (games, song, dance etc) to introduce kids to the piano, sight reading, ear training and playing. Each weekly class would introduce a key, 2-3 small piano pieces from a beginner book, ensemble playing with other kids, ear training games, sight reading games etc. They are usually parent/child classes. The teacher then gradually transitions the children to private piano lessons when they feel that the time is right for each child. We have followed this method and the process has been kind and gentle on us! DS has enjoyed (still does) time at the piano because of the fun component of this method. So, this is a great age to start if there is interest in the child. But, it is real slow going in the beginning and be prepared to spend a lot of time with your child helping with the practicing because at this age, they do need a lot of hand holding. Go for it!

computer programming and a robotics kit will keep him busy for a long time. Though, I love all the above suggestions as well!

Well, this could be a solution to your problems with this school. Purchase your own copy of the textbook for next year and teach at home so that your child is ahead of the teacher and that your child has enough time to review everything with you!

My thought is that this is a protective husband and father who feels that his wife on crutches and his 11 year old taking off by themselves for a vacation might bring problems for those two and that he would not be around to help if needed. Everyone knows that it is not illegal to take your child on vacations inside the US when the parents are still married ...