About Prodigy -- do you actually believe the grade levels on that? It seems way too easy. My 7yo found it recently and is having fun with it, but it gives him 6th and 7th grade questions mostly, and I'm sure he's not that far ahead. The questions seem pretty low on required thinking.

My son likes the "Chemist" iPad app and the virtual chemistry labs on this site http://chemcollective.org/vlabs Both let you mix chemicals in a virtual lab, that may not be practical or safe in the home. But they react just like the real ones.

Mystery of the Periodic table is for middle schoolers, so should be fine.

Second the Periodic Table of Videos, and their molecular videos. A molecular modeling kit and the website ptable.com With the site set in "compounds" mode, you can build molecules by hand, then check if they exist and what they are, challenge yourself to build molecules with certain properties, play competitive molecule-building games etc... The Mystery of the Periodic Table Book. That one's good on the history of how chemistry got discovered, and helps lay out the scientific thinking of it all. Real chemicals that make interesting reactions (some with supervison, probably). Understanding basic reduction/oxidation principles allows you to take advantage of the energy embedded in aluminum to blow up hydrogen balloons, set off thermite reactions, etc...

Where do you order ferrofluid? (my chem nut son -- who got a distillation kit and glassware for Christmas) has a birthday coming up soon and would love to have ferrofluid.

There's the Periodic Videos (chemistry) and the Molecular Videos (more chemistry -- molecules rather than just elements) and the same filmmaker made Sixty Symbols (physics) and Numberphile (math) All good from what I've seen, though my kid's mostly obsessed with the chem ones.

The Periodic Table of Videos (Chemistry) is great, along with the associated Physics and Math channels. Small bite-sized pieces, so it doesn't take the time of a whole documentary, and it's all free. My non-reading 6yo has taught himself some pretty advanced chemistry through videos and web resources.

A fun thing to do with Molymods is to challenge each other to put together a molecule, then look it up (can use the "compounds" section of the dynamic periodic table for this) to see if it really exists and what it does. My son and I played lots of "Molecule Challenge", and when he got better, we'd add rules -- make a colored molecule, an explosive, an acid, etc... He played this by himself for hours and hours as well. We're visiting family now, and the box of Molymod is the one toy he's carried from home.

If you're OK with videos, you have to try the Periodic Table of Videos. Short videos on every chemical element from a university in England, plus many molecules, etc... That plus the dynamic periodic table website plus a few molymod chemical modeling kits have turned my kid into an obsessed little chemist for over a year now. He got into all of this at 5, and now he's 6, and the one thing he insisted on bringing on a long trip to visit family over Thanskgiving was his box of molecule models and two chemistry books. He can't do a regular chemistry class yet because he couldn't handle the algebra (though in the context of this board, I don't want to presume your 5yo can't!) But a year in, I'm really glad he couldn't, because he has the concepts of how chemicals and reactions work at a really intuitive level, much better than most adults, who took chemistry in a context of being so distracted by solving the math problems that they never really learned to look at a chemical structure and see what was an acid, and why certain acids would be stronger than others, or what types of molecules you might expect to be explosive, etc... (he gets many strange looks carrying the molecule modeling kit around and trying to explain it all to adults) We've used lots of other fun resources along the way. Found it cheaper to buy safe chemcals in bulk rather than kits -- citric acid and borax and baking soda and vinegar and such are good for a kid that age. Test tubes and beakers and the Basher Science chemistry books, and Theodore Gray's molecule book, and the "Mystery of the Periodic Table" as a read-aloud, which is really great for going through the history of it all and how chemists figured out the really basic stuff about what elements were and how they could combine. My son has started making his own videos -- you can see how a little kid might use a molecule kit in those: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvHVUgpVzWSQ_bZogMPzBzQ Sorry for the novel. Couldn't help it because I've been gathering up all these resources for awhile with the same age kid. I have more, too, and am still looking for more yet since mine is still so interested.

I have a first grader who's pretty good at math and has learned nearly everything he knows by talking to me while we walk through the woods. Math is so easy to do verbally with fun puzzle-ish games, traveling or otherwise. If it helps, I'll share some of my son's favorite no-paper-needed ones. Magic function: Take turns coming up with a mathematical function, anything from x+1 to (the square root of x)/2^2. One person asks numbers, and the other person spits back what the function says. Guess the function. Good practice on both sides, playable at any level. My kid got interested in graphing functions after this game. Puzzle scenarios. Some good ones have been 'water bottle problems', where we pretend that each family member has a water bottle twice as big as the next persons, and come up with different scenarios where you have to fill them different amounts, pour them into other bottles, lots of converting and playing with fractions in that one. Or 'oops too many things on the scale' -- you want to know the weight of two different variables, and the first time weigh 2 of one and 3 of the other, second time 4 of one and 1 of the other, etc... Making up silly stories to explore new mathematical concepts is quite fun, really. We do this more or less as interest wanes and waxes, but I'm pretty sure my first grader learned more math from a month or two of doing this daily than from anything else we've ever done.

Thanks for all the puzzle book ideas. My 4.5 yr old has the first "mind benders" book from the critical thinking company, and I can see harder versions might appeal to my older kid. Having to read everything aloud to him is kind of a damper, though. What do I do with a kid who likes trying to make me guess his function (x-1)(x)(x+2)(x+3) and discuss the stability of decaborane, but who can read on the level of "the king can sing"?

I'm not expecting any sort of pace, since math is optional in his world. We only do it when he wants to. And who am I to say he shouldn't spend an extra couple weeks making up his own polyomino problems? He's nearly 6.5 now. Would be going into first grade in the fall, by age. Not that different from 7. It would not be kind to take the book he has away from him now, though I don't have to offer to buy him more of them. But I don't know. I don't have any reason to suspect this kid is any kind of genius, not even a "run of the mill genius." I have no idea what most geeky kids know at 6, so it would be presumptuous of me to try and rate mine in comparison. But I do wonder how you could prevent any kid from knowing about multiplication? Multiplication and division are pretty obvious things to do with numbers, and I can't imagine answering a preschooler's math questions without mentioning the concept. It seems very unlikely a kid could reach age 6, or the point of being able to do complicated addition/subtraction without being quite familiar with simple multiplication? Or maybe I'm missing your point.

Thought I should update to say how it worked out for us. Got the 3A book, only did the first lesson or two before several months of travel. Then, got home and he was interested to dive into it in earnest again. He's not quite 6.5 now. He loved the geometry section. We spent a long time on it, and when he got stuck, we'd step out of the book and trade off making eachother puzzles of the same type, then he'd go back. He ended up managing most of the double star problems in the end, and was proud of that. Now we're doing the skip counting. So, we're going through it very slowly, and I'm reading everything out loud (we read the guide sections lots of times), but he's doing the math himself. And something seems to be sticking. We've been done with the "polyominos" for a while, but yesterday morning he sat up in bed announcing he wanted to figure out how many possible hexominos there were, and whether it was possible to make them with dominos, L-triominos, straight triominos, or none of those. And proceeded to make some hexominos and use some of the Beast techniques to prove his answer. I still think he might not pass the pre-test, because he doesn't do ANY work on paper, and doesn't know official techniques like regrouping, though he's perfectly happy to do complicated subtraction in his head in his own way. But he loves puzzles, and we trade verbal math puzzles of all types as just a fun activity. So it's perfect for him. I think he'd never get to "fluent" if I made him try, but he gets lots of practice with facts in solving puzzles and is starting to memorize some stuff. I guess I'll keep reading BA aloud for awhile. Also, does anyone have a good resource for logic puzzles? I'd just love to see a huge list of different types to jog my own brain into thinking of more. Stuff like "if you and your sister each ate a quarter of the muffin batch, and daddy ate 5, and there was just one left for me, how many muffins did I make?" or "magic function" where I'll think of something like (x-3)/2 and he'll ask me numbers, I'll spit out the answers until he can guess what operations I was doing. Or "if I have 15 cabbages and twice as many are red as green, how many are red?" "or if you run twice as fast as your friend, and you each run twice as fast downhill as up, and your friend takes 20 seconds to run down the hill, how long do you have to wait at the top if you both run down then up?" He says that the hardest part is figuring out how to solve the problem, and if he knows how, then it's "too easy," so it's really variety of type I'm looking for. I need to keep the numbers easy enough for mental math, but the concepts can be tricky.

I second Periodic Table of Videos. Also pHET simulations and the Dynamic periodic table website, and a Molymod molecular modeling kit to build compounds. Last year at 5 and 6 yrs old, my kid spent 9 months with these tools, and taught himself so much chemistry that few adults he encountered knew more. And he couldn't even read. It was quite impressive what those tools can do. You can compare properties of all the elements with the ptable site, build molecules and test out if they're real, go to their wikipedia articles, and on and on.

We have lots of Molymod here. Chemistry has been my 6yo's obsession for 6 months. Those sets are great. I think all elementary kids should learn with them -- college is much too late.

umm... Not to derail too much, but can you remember any of those chemistry books? Going through Disappearing Spoon (reading it aloud to him) with my 6yo chem nut now, did Mystery of the Periodic Table already, and looking for more.

I only wish they had easy-reader science books that had a much higher level of science. I've found those sorts of things in the library now and then, but inevitably, if it's a topic he's actually interested in, my son already knows vastly more than the book. I think it's a common problem for kids whose concept understanding greatly exceeds their decoding. In fact, the enormous gap between what he could possibly read and what he might want to read is probably one of the reasons he hasn't learned yet.

Visual and video resources are great for kids like that. I have a kindergartener who's an insatiable learner and way ahead of the curve in math and science, but can't read yet. He's been obsessed with chemistry for around 6 months and knows more than most adults at this point, largely self-taught through websites and videos. Very project-based as well, always building molecules and writing chemical reactions. There's a lot of stuff that can be navigated with minimal reading once you know what you're looking for. I imagine she could read the stats on different cats (life span, size, etc...) similar to how my son can read the stats on chemicals if you bookmark the right sorts of sites for her. And he loves doing google image searches (with a bit of spelling help from me). She could probably get anatomy and all kinds of things that way.

We have Molymod kits. Lots and lots of Molymod kits. I think two organic student sets, an inorganic student set, and an instructor organic/inorganic set, and a buckyball. Excessive, but our school district's homeschool program will pay for it, and he loves nothing more. Molymod Game: Often, the adults in our family play Bananagrams after dinner. So today, my husband and son invented "atom grams" -- sort of a bananagrams-ish boggle-ish molecule building game. In which you start out with ten random atoms (hydrogens and bonds are free), then build molecules until all the "holes" are filled in your atoms. A finished person says "add!" and everyone draws another atom. Game ends when someone builds 8 molecules, and points are given for each non-hydrogen atom in real molecules (as determined by our internet references). My son managed to beat everyone else, all four times we played (I was close!). Can't think of any other game that we have where a 5yo has a fair shake, and it was actually quite fun. We learned quite a bit as well, by looking up and reading about some of the lucky guess molecules (ones we weren't sure were real but turned out to be).

So, the kid in question just broke his leg and is in a huge awkward cast. And his 6th birthday is coming up. And he decided on the way out of picking his sister up from preschool to double numbers in his head -- which he did completely correctly up to 16,384, and with I think only one small error that made his next two slightly off. As he was doing it, he was talking about things like two 80s "making an extra hundred" so I think he's pretty close to regrouping even though he's not been taught it. Basically, I think his arithmetic is probably fine, and I'm REALLY going to need some indoor stuff to keep him occupied for the next couple months. I might just go for it. Can you tell me which kits he loved best? My kid's 6th birthday is coming up in two weeks (and that broken leg...). His current passion is chemistry, but he likes all science. In fact, he spends probably hours a day building with his now outrageously large collection of molecular modeling kits, so "academic legos" are right up his alley.

Thank you for all the thoughts. As for his math skills, I'll try the pretest. He knows all the concepts, and is quite good at mental arithmetic, but simply hasn't ever been taught standard algorithms or multiplication tables. So he can do something like 205-173, but will do it in his head as 200-170-3+5. And while something like 34x4, or a sixth of a minute, or 3 x 1.5 is fairly easy, 6x7 is harder, since he hasn't memorized it but will do it as 7x10 /2 +7. The thing he seemed most interested in when we looked at the sample pages wasn't so much the cuteness (he doesn't really need cute -- happy to watch college chemistry lectures on you tube), but the problems. He wouldn't stop until he'd gotten all the shapes right. He really liked the weights as well, wanted to give the answers before I read them, and was excited to go and figure out the number larger than 14 that couldn't be made with 5s and 6s. If it matters, he's a very focused kid for his age. He did Annos hat tricks last year. We have Penrose, but he's only occasionally interested. We'll work on reading too, but I don't think it's reasonable or fair to hold him back in math and science (he's always teaching chemistry to random adults, and is well above kindergarten level in both), by the fact that he's still sounding out simple words and has the handwriting of a 4yo. desertflower -- I can't help but add a few of my favorite chem resources, since my kid is a chemistry fanatic right now. The "compound" section of ptable.com is wonderful for building molecules. My son likes "molecule challenges" where we challenge eachother to build acids, or explosives, or antibiotics, or molecules of every color of the rainbow, or stinky molecules... We then use that site to help/check ourselves. He can now describe to you why certain acids are stronger than others, why certain things are more or less toxic or stable, etc.. I also think he's watched everything on the periodic table of videos and their molecular videos, and played most of the phet chemistry simulations

My kid will turn 6 in a few weeks. He's not advanced in everything, but he is in science and math. He looked over my shoulder at the sample bits of Beast 3A today, and wanted to work through it with me, and then said he wanted more. He can't read, and I don't think he could work through the math all by himself, even if he could. But he likes puzzles and challenges, and working through things with me, talking through strategies. I don't think he really wants or needs a whole K-2 math curriculum. So I was thinking about getting Beast 3A, and just planning to work on it slowly, together, as he has interest, with me reading aloud and covering any missing pieces as we need. Does that make sense? It seems like it might not be a bad starting point, even if we end up setting it aside for awhile. He's picked up so much math without us ever doing more than chatting about it, so I'm much more interested in having challenging puzzle math around for when he wants it, rather than worksheets of computations.

Makes sense. He can write down answers (in keeping score of games), but handwriting is hard for him. Perhaps a good approach would be to attempt to introduce book math at a third or fourth grade level, whenever the kid gets there on his own? Of course, I'd have to figure out what third or fourth grade level is, and deal with gaps and such...

Many interesting thoughts here. Sort of a spinoff question, and I don't know if it belongs here or in another thread. When/how/would you introduce formal math to a young kid who seems to pick it up naturally? I have a kindergarten kid (almost 6), who seems to understand more math than is common for his age. He adds the scores when we play games, and easily handles the two and three digit numbers involved. He occasionally wants to do oral math problems, things like "42 x 3" or "156 x 2" or "one and a half 3s" He seems to have a good intuitive understanding of things like place value into the millions, percents, fractions, negative numbers, etc... Like today when he was counting to ten very fast and I told him "That's not 10 seconds, I think that was only 2!" he instantly replies "So I was counting at a fifth of a second, right?" This is all mental, since he doesn't know any official on-paper type strategies like borrowing and carrying, or multiplication tables. And other than the very occasional desire to trade math problems, mostly just as it comes up in life. Sometimes I talk through some mental math strategy when he asks me a question, I think he mostly just learns it by thinking and an occasional kenken puzzle? He spent a month or so a year ago where he was doing a bit from the Miquon red and orange books, but not much since. If you had this kid, would you try to encourage more formal math, or encourage him to intuit it awhile longer? Obviously he knows plenty for kindergarten, and it's interesting to watch him figure out math on his own. On the other hand, it does seem like math is something he might have the potential to be good at, and I know he adores science (chemistry is his current burning passion), so perhaps it would be helpful if I did suggest a slightly less scattered approach? I've glanced at a few first and second grade math worksheets, and it seems the only thing he might not know would be how to do a problem with too many numbers to hold in his head. But I'm sure a whole curriculum would have more. (If it matters, he doesn't really read at all yet, so I'd have to read any non-video content to him. And his handwriting is awful)