My school used upper levels of Saxon, way back when. I went from a kid who loved math, with it being my favorite subject and competing in MathCounts, to thinking math was a miserable subject that made no sense. Saxon contained almost no “math sense”; it was problem after problem after problem of fill-in-the-blank plugging in of numbers using a prescribed way of doing things. The sheer number of problems meant math homework took longer than all my other subjects combined, even though I still usually intuitively understood the math itself. It was drudgery.

May I ask what program the tutor recommends for your child?

I can not imagine thinking that Saxon didn’t have enough review and repetition. I detest the program, in part because I believe it to have such a ridiculous excess of review and repetition. Has this tutor ever actually used Saxon?

Told my daughter her score and simply “forgot” to remind her that there were medals, since she places little emphasis on such herself and didn’t remember. So, now she’s perfectly happy with her score. 🙂

DD will be mildly disappointed. She missed a medal by a point.

You could add in some spiral review in a fun way by having him play Prodigy Math for a while a few times per week. It’s fun enough that it likely won’t feel like a chore, and gives a good mix of problems or you can use the teacher portal to assign certain types of problems.

By and large, the games are a replacement for the same drill that can be accomplished with flash cards.

We had a similar type of list. Some of the things on it: programming in Scratch or with her robots learning a new art skill (via her art books or an art video or some other prompt) Zometool challenges playing with molecular modeling projects/suggestions from books like This Book Thinks You’re a Math Genius or This Book Thinks You’re an Artist anything to complete a DIY.org project learning/practicing calligraphy or other hand lettering techniques playing on Burning Cargo practicing piano or doing a lesson on Hoffman Academy projects from science kits on hand

Not me

For me, the book itself gives that space to think about the ideas, and the classes recommend that students work through the book before class. The classes shouldn’t be a rehash of the book. If they are, then they should stop advising that students work through the book first, because that just bores the students who follow that instruction. Text-based simply appeals to one learning preference. Some people learn best by direct instruction, some by video, some with manipulatives, some with talking concepts through; there are so many ways to learn. I learn some by reading, but I rarely fully internalize a concept that way. For me, it’s about getting to discover and play on my own, which is unlikely to happen in any online class. My kid learns by hearing a concept talked through: a verbal/audio explanation of a concept, questioning (doesn’t matter if questions are in audio or text format), and verbal/audio responses - basically she learns when the format is a conversational style, even if the conversation itself is modified to fit a class style. And she’s a more auditory learner than I am. She loves audiobooks and listening to lectures, whereas I have no idea why anyone would like such things.

Lol, I’m well above that age range and found the all-text format at least as miserable as my kid did. She and I have pretty different learning styles, and it wouldn’t work for either one of us.

My very young kid adores the discovery method, and will cite the fact that the book gives problems before teaching how to do them as one of the reasons she most loves AOPS. Really, even though working straight from the book isn’t the best fit for her, either, she now starts each topic with the opening questions from the book section so that she gets the “leading discovery questions” from the book before she breaks off to Alcumus or directly to challenging problems. The online class was a bust for her for multiple reasons. It really seems to me that the kids who would do best with the all-text format of the classes would be the kids who would also do the best with the all-text format of the book. Maybe this is great for matching classes to the kids who are already thriving with the books, but it seems a wasted opportunity to me. The classes could be used to pull in the kids who don’t thrive with just the books. It wouldn’t even take something especially more interactive. At the most minimal end, one tone when answers were pushed through, and a different tone when a new question was asked, would at least be a prompt for my kid to tune back in after she spaced out waiting for answers to be posted. Much better for her would be audio/video from the instructor; responses or questions from students could still be text-based. I agree from what I saw in her class that the kids who were treating it like a standard class, instead of doing the discovery questions first, were missing out. It seems as though it took away the AOPS flavor. On the other hand, my kid usually “got” the full concept from the discovery questions in the book and Alcumus, so all the weekly homework problems beyond that just felt like busywork to her. And when the instructor did lead through in a discovery-based manner, the class was only repeating what she had already done independently with the book, so a complete waste of time.

Top 5? Like a race to the answers? This might have made it more interesting for my kid. She would answer a question, then wait for the answers to get pushed through, get distracted, and completely lose the thread of the class in her distraction. And which answers were pushed through for her class seemed random. I watched at times, and she would have immediately gotten an answer and typed it in, 10 answers would be pushed through that were identical to hers but hers wasn’t pushed through, and she would get discouraged. Other times, she took the time to carefully format with LaTeX, and 1-2 answers would be pushed through without formatting before she could finish. I never could discern a pattern to what was pushed through and what wasn’t, or to the length of time given to respond.

We will continue to use the AOPS books independently.

My 8 year old has especially loved the following in the last year: Prydain Chronicles series The Penderwicks The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher (I especially loved this one!) The Graveyard Book (not aimed at kids, but it was well within what I’m comfortable with for her, and the audiobook is especially awesome) The Mysterious Benedict Society Tuesdays at the Castle (she read the rest of the series independently) The Lemonade War Frindle Wonder Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos (and the rest of the series)

It’s my daughter’s second year doing Destination Imagination. She loves it, but it stretches every kid on the team - applying knowledge, learning new skills, dedicated teamwork, little to no adult assistance or scaffolding allowed, and being judged heavily on creativity and the ability to think on their feet. It’s easily the hardest thing she does. Her tiny, young, 3-person team just took 3rd place at State Finals! They’re ridiculously excited. Completely over the moon. Next up is preparing for Global Finals!

Thanks everyone! Voting is now closed. He didn’t win, but they’ve said there will be a second place prize, so hopefully there will still be some free pizzas coming their way!

My daughter went through about a year at 5/6 years old where the next step in math curriculum was a tad bit too challenging for her and she just plain disliked all other math curriculum. I had written a blog post about the resources we used at that time, in case any of it is helpful to you: http://everchangingchild.blogspot.com/2016/05/what-math-break-looks-like-at-my-house.html. At the time, it did feel like a holding pattern, but I realize now that it wasn’t. She preferred learning new concepts to practicing ones she was already familiar with (still does, really), and she needed some time to mature before she could struggle productively with the more challenging material. Just to say that a “holding pattern” might not be an altogether bad thing!

My brother is a finalist to win free pizza for a year. With two hungry kids, it would go to good use! Could you click on this link and vote for #2, please? https://www.hotboxpizza.com/sbpc-vote/ Rules state to vote only once, please! ETA: voting is now closed!

I had intended to go through Jousting Armadillos before AOPS, but JA was nearly all review, and my kid wasn’t interested in review. We did a few sections that were new or approached things notable differently than Beast, then went directly into AOPS Intro to Algebra. The abrupt change in format definitely didn’t make my kid happy (she’d prefer those Beasts all the way through Calculus, I’m pretty sure!) but the content hasn’t been an issue at all.

We own and have regularly played Photosynthesis, Evolution, Valence Plus, and Cytosis. Photosynthesis doesn’t really teach much of anything science-related, but it’s a gorgeous game and a lot of fun to play. I always hesitate to recommend Evolution as a science game, because the game mechanisms are more clearly indicative of an intelligent designer than of actual evolution. However, it is great for discussions on that topic, as well as for discussions on niches, predator/prey, defense mechanisms, population increase/decrease in response to availability of resources, and similar topics. Valence Plus and Cytosis are both fun to play, and fairly straightforward in their application to science.

My daughter is in the last week of Algebra A. She did not find the classes themselves particularly helpful/useful. They want students to have already read the section and worked at least some problems before class, and yet the class time was spent going over the same basic information that they were expected to have already read and worked with. So, while she did usually attend the classes, she was no worse off during the weeks she skipped class due to schedule conflicts. The full class transcripts are posted, so if there are questions, it’s easy enough to see what was discussed.

I suggested to my kid that she might want to keep a blog of some upcoming adventures. She hasn’t really read blogs before, and would like some examples. Of course, there’s about a million blogs out there, but does anyone know of some good examples of blogs written by kids?

You might use Alcumus for this. If getting the questions correct, it usually only takes 3-4 questions to move on to the next section. They could simply work through until they hit something they don’t know, and then switch to the book for that section.

I’ve always played this by ear rather than having a systematic method. In the early years, my daughter was a natural reader and speller, so those didn’t need done as formal subjects for us. That opened up a bit of time to fit in other things. There are subjects covered every year in WTM that I find work best for us as occasional subjects or very lightly hit. Take grammar, for example. I could do this very slowly and incrementally with First Language Lessons, but I knew that wouldn’t fit my daughter at all. Instead, we jumped in with MCT’s grammar, which moves along much faster and with less time commitment, and then we took a break from grammar co pletely because she retained it very well and had enough grammar for elementary level. Logic is another one: we have fun logic workbooks that she worked through at 1-2 pages/week, and play lots of logic-based games, and that’s all we’ve needed until/unless we decide to do formal logic at a much higher level. Some things are simply interest based. My daughter has no interest in learning Latin, and neither do I. She loves living languages, speaks a second language well, and wants to learn more, but there will be no Latin here outside of some word roots study.