Jump to content

Menu

seaben

Members
  • Posts

    67
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by seaben

  1. Where are you stopping in the curriculum?
  2. This is a personal celebration. I just finished giving my talk about Math Circles at the Northwest Math Conference. Definitely out of my normal wheelhouse and I'm really happy with how it went. If you're curious I dumped the slide deck here: http://mymathclub.blogspot.com/2018/10/math-circle-talk-slide-deck.html
  3. Thanks for the responses so far. I'm looking for physical resources more than online ones since I'm more familiar with the latter. From what I was told, this is a student who works at mathematical ideas on his own like analyzing Pascal's Triangle for various formulas or self deriving the quadratic equation but he hasn't had access to anything outside school and the regular math pathway there. The friend is their former math teacher who is trying to find more resources.
  4. I have a friend who was looking for Math enrichment resources for a really talented 10th grader taking Geometry right now in school. Does anyone know of anything that would work? Thanks
  5. I'll add on something I found when we were doing Intro to Alg from the textbooks. Somewhere around chapter 15 you reach a point where the material is what would traditionally be Alg2. That roughly corresponds to where the online classes split the book in half. If you look at the contents for Intermediate Algebra you'll see what then appears to be the same topics mostly repeated over again. I ended up asking about it on the AoPS forums and the advice from Richard Rusczyk was as follows: "rrusczyk wrote: as the others in this thread note, the material in the Intro books provides a foundation on which the Intermediate books build. There is some overlap as review, but you'll find the Intermediate book a lot smoother sailing if you go through the rest of the Intro book first."
  6. I see you've changed plans but I've been thinking about your original post and had a few thoughts. 1. I think its useful to keep thinking long range. If you end up finishing Algebra now and doing a 2nd time next year in 4th what's your overall trajectory(ies)? So what do you want to have happen by High School? I like thinking about a range of possibilities since things change but with radical acceleration its good to think through the whole process. Just for instance, here we have an IB HS that maybe we might use and that has a rigid structure so it doesn't seem useful to push Calculus early and more likely to be useful to go side wise into other topics instead. That's just an example, but the idea applies even with very different goals. 2. I think by 4th its also useful to involve your son a bit in the planning with the idea that he transitions over the years to taking the lead. So I'd be really interested how deep his interest in camp really is vs physics. (I can't quite tell from your posts) I think its appropriate to share some of the range of possibilities for the next few years even though you still will direct the process at this point. Maybe that will help clarify which way to go. 3. I know its fairly popular on this board to repeat the same topic twice but I personally would have hated that at the same age. I think especially when you're this ahead of the curve you have the opportunity to it do it once but do it well and thoroughly. This is where knowing your own child really comes into play. 4. Re:jumping around. What makes the AoPS books special to me is less the direct presentation of topics than the arrangement and selection of problem sets. So if your son really is passionate about he math I would take about it with him and think about either threading in the challenge problems or just using one of the original AoPS contest books over the year The key to me is constant exposure to interesting problems but at a pace that avoids burnout. 5. Also post algebra there really are a lot of topics and directions to turn to besides Geometry. Perhaps the academy can help here or if you're considering Epsilon Camp maybe finding a tutor able to customize things would be on the table. Anyway I hope this helps and good luck
  7. My general rule of thumb is that once I've asked permission to bend a rule and been told no that I accept and move on.
  8. I ran a 4th / 5th group which used MOEMS for several years. I blogged about it on a week to week basis at mymathclub.blogspot.com. I have a couple starter pages: Resource List: http://mymathclub.blogspot.com/p/resources.html. In particular there's a activity map for each year linked off of that. Getting Started: http://mymathclub.blogspot.com/p/how-to-get-started.html Also I think the year end wraps up could be helpful. Good luck
  9. I'm having a fun time following the big math off at http://aperiodical.com/2018/06/announcing-the-big-internet-math-off/ There are some great ideas here either for just sharing with kids or to build an activity out of and the format is genius. Check it out.
  10. I think it also depends how much time you plan to devote per week to each book. To give a slower pace, we did both PA and Algebra over a roughly 18 month period each but we were usually working at 15-20 minute intervals per day M-F.
  11. There's a hard problem here. The social dynamics of age gaps are difficult to manage especially in Elementary and to some extent Middle School . Once too many younger kids are present the older kids tend to stop coming because of the "babies" even if they are intellectually on the same level.
  12. For those of you in Seattle, my joke about this to a friend was this is certainly going to cement Odle MS's dominance in events like MathCounts. In all seriousness, traffic being what it is, I don't think it will pull many people from the city like our family.
  13. I've used 3 out of the 4 of those books. I liked them all but PreAlg was actually my favorite due to the brilliance of the problem set arrangements. However, format wise they all are very similar. So I'm curious what you mean by more exciting? Its just a textbook and there certainly is a low barrier to just trying them out to see if any of them, Number Theory or Counting and Probability included are a good fit. But I would assume if you dislike one then you're going to have a similar experience with the rest of them. Another option is to use them as enrichment resources around another curriculum, picking and choosing problems and sections as desired.
  14. I would agree with Daijobu's post above about the value of competing regardless of scores. The AMC problems themselves are quite good and worth looking at and figuring out how to solve no matter whether you even take the real tests. Checkout mikesmathpage .wordpress.com to see how they can be a really great enrichment activity on their own. And long term if math studies is a goal there is definitely more than one path to success. AMC scores can help but are not necessary. Take a look at opportunities like http://hcssim.org/ for instance.
  15. Here's an old getting started with a Math Club post I put together: http://mymathclub.blogspot.com/p/how-to-get-started.html. I think when starting its important to clarify your goals. There is an interesting quiz I linked to from natural math that was good that way. Once decided upon then yes advertise based on your vision. Beyond that its also good to know your potential target audience. Third grade is still pretty young for anything intense and you're less likely to find others who want to go that way. Also after working with a lot of 4th and 5th graders, I'm going to throw it out there that on average they don't have long attention spans for challenging work. There are outliers but I'd plan on no more than 20-30 minutes of focus from a group as a whole at the earliest ages and its equally important to think about making it fun at the same time so kids keep coming back. [Also one other thing to keep in mind about AMC10 or any other contest is that there is a large processing speed component to them. There is very limited time to do the questions and you have to either think quickly or quickly recognize the problem structure to even finish at all. This doesn't mirror mathematics in the real world. Its often useful to separate whether given unlimited time you can solve the problems from the practice tests (and learn from them) vs. can you solve them in 75 minutes etc. While practice can improve performance, you may find it plateaus out just due to that processing speed constraint. Its usually good to be clear eyed about this and focus on goals that serve you long term if you're not lucky enough to be "super fast".]
  16. I brought about half of the math club I was leading in 5th grade to try it out for the first time (they were all doing a 7th grade curriculum in school so it was reasonable from a leveling perspective). It's a bit tricky since it must be administered by a teacher in a school setting, That year I lucked out and had a friend arranging it with extra test packets. So assuming you can find space I'd say after reaching the 6th grade curriculum. You can always try a practice version and see if you're scoring high enough for it to be a positive experience and waiting until actual 6th grade is perfectly fine too.
  17. If you just go on the AoPS sequence, the textbooks will continue to thread in increasingly difficult competitive math problems which should serve you well by the time your son starts trying the AMC8. I don't think you necessarily need to do anything more yet just keep moving through the curriculum. When you've reached PA/Algebra it might be time to reevaluate assuming there is still interest. But Math Circles are great anyway even if you're not competitive and if you can find or start one in your area that would certainly work well. I think finding math peers and cultivating a sense of joy/passion is just as important in the long run. [Got the wrong poster originally]
  18. They are definitely running a mathjam tonight to discuss them.
  19. So far we're really enjoying these videos at home that go over the last 5 AMC 10 problems from this year. https://artofproblemsolving.com/videos/amc I wasn't sure if my son initially wanted to talk about the problems/solutions anymore and these provided a really motivating start.
  20. MAA maintains statistics broken down by <= 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 so I'm fairly sure those are the options on the Scantron. As far as MAA goes its fine to take the test in 7th and accurately report that.
  21. What I found worked well with a younger kid starting AoPS pre-algebra was to take it slowly but consistently. We did 10-15 minutes max in the beginning and finished the book over 18 months. The videos also were a big hit which can supplant a lot of the text/exercises. You just have to be careful about checking what's covered if you go that way. I also treated it like a tutoring session, where I asked questions and framed things when necessary. Most importantly, a healthy amount of math diversions via games/math videos etc. was useful. My feeling is that if you're accelerated there's no reason to skip any fun/interesting diversions.
  22. I was just having a conversation with a friend about the difficulty of the IB HL Math exam. Here you have to get a 7/7 for credit at the state university and it looks like its easier to either go the AP route or take a community college math class and transfer credits. Does anyone have any experience with this? Is it really that much more difficult and/or is it worth it to go down that path anyway?
  23. There are many compelling reasons to take the online classes but I'm not certain why you'd do it just to go faster. One of the key advantages of working at home is the ability to customize the pace as much as you want. By looking at the general schedule, you could easily replicate the timing and general assignment load of the online classes yourself.
  24. Just to throw another routine out there: We started AoPS pre-alg in the middle of 2nd grade which was a big lift. Initially we did 10-15 minutes a day with me acting as a tutor and watching how it went. The initial adjustment for the first 4 chapters was fairly hard. Half way through the book or so we switched from reading the exercises to watching the videos instead but otherwise we also worked through all the problems however long it took. Sometimes that looked like 3 weeks on a chapter and I also took the freedom to use the time for additional topic/videos if they looked interesting for example watching a numberphile video (I think this was important from a joy perspective). Overall adjusting for Summer break this was a 20 mo. process i.e. slow but steady. I was fairly happy, with the results in terms of retention and growth in problem solving.
  25. I just received the Math Counts materials for the year and I think the poster is particularly charming. I put a photo here: http://bit.ly/2yJ7IHz. Its a fun problem too
×
×
  • Create New...