Would like to provide enrichment for my 6th grader.

[Guest biotechRegi]

Hi, everyone. I used to be a home-teaching mom of 3, but circumstances led to us putting the kids in school, and I'm near to finishing my Bachelor of Science degree.

 

My son is like me in that we are concept people. We get concepts rather quickly. We've had discussions on cosmology, even, and the Theory of Relativity. That was back in the spring of this year.

 

I would really like to provide him some enrichment in math and science, but really don't know how to supplement his public school program. His father is not on board with taking him out of school, and to be honest, I'm not really keen on it, either, as neither of us really have time to coordinate and administrate the whole shebang again.

 

So, I was searching the web for ideas on how to provide some additional learning for him. I do not know that he's gifted by the school's measure, and the school system here is supposed to be very good, among the best in the county.

 

I don't really care if he tests out as gifted, but I see his abilities shining through, and think that, given that our brains work similarly, his seeming to be a little bored, in spite of making good grades, and my scientific/mathematical training as part of my degree program, I may just be the best person to provide this for him.

 

I really don't want to let him "fall through the cracks," as I felt I was allowed to do. I want to foster his love of learning, and give him as much of a leg up as I am able.

 

Uh, that's probably a sermon to the choir, and all of that to say: I came to get suggestions for how to offer more for my son, so he doesn't lose interest in school. lol.

 

Thank you. :)

[OSUBuckeye]

The Mechanical Universe videos:

http://www.malcolmgin.com/blog/2008/10/07/caltech-the-mechanical-universe-series-on-google-video/

They're a half-hour each, from 1985 (so the hair styles and video quality are a little dated), but they're cool discussions about the topics in a standard physics course. Yes, they're originally designed as intro college level material, but it's not like your kid is going to be tested for perfectly solving the equations, they're just being exposed to the concepts of velocity, elasticity, or thermodynamics. The show goes into the history of physics (Newton, Kepler, Farraday), as well as every-day physics in action. For instance, one episode had probably ten minutes of billiards footage to show the transfer of momentum.

 

The series came from a CalTech project to educate adult learners who couldn't afford traditional college, and one of the things I really like about it is how well it shows physics concepts in real-life. It also takes a few seconds to show how calculus derives the equations we use (which we didn't cover in my high-school algebra-based physics course), but in a way that assist in greater understanding, rather than a way that makes it fly over kids heads. It might wake up your child into finding more about how scientiests use all that cool math stuff, too. Of course, this video series may be something to save for high school, but again, I think a science-y kid might just eat those lectures up. They personally were my favorite part of physics in high school, like Bill Nye for (young) adults.

Edited October 19, 2012 by OSUBuckeye

[Guest biotechRegi]

Thank you for the ideas!

 

He was in science club in elementary school. I'm not sure if he's looked into it at his middle school, or not, yet. It could be that he's still adjusting.

 

He likes other kids, but he often will pull away from them because, as he put it, their personalities are different from his. :001_huh:

 

:lol:

 

We had a talk today, where I exposed him to some new math concepts. He didn't like that the radical didn't have a number associated with it, but when I told him that it's implied, but that if it were another power we were finding the root of, we would right (edit: write, sheesh) the power. He understood. Then, I drew a picture to show him that a square is really a square, a cube function really tells us about a cube and shows us 3 dimensions, but wrote radicals with 3, 4, 5...

 

So he asked me if we could have an image of five dimensions. *jaw drop*

 

It seemed the intuitive thing to ask, but he actually drew a picture. So, then we talked about how this image, if we took it off the paper COULD show us 5 dimensions, but it could really be described by 3. However, if we followed that idea, and we made an infinite number of lines coming out from the vertex of the 5, we would have a solid object. lol.

 

Anyway, it was interesting, and I'd really like for us to keep thinking like this, and maybe write ourselves a list of questions we want answers to, but don't know the answers yet, and find out what others think.