Well, we of course did the "faster" route ourselves, and so far...no regrets, but I can't wait to have input from honors algebra 2, which I'm really hoping at the moment is my "holy grail" for the short term at least.

DD13 though really is at a good place at the moment, despite her "slower" start. I'm not sure in hindsight that moving her ahead would have been a good plan. Of course her scores, while high, never came close to DS's levels .

Go with your gut though, and if you find her struggling....adjust accordingly. There is no harm in moving ahead if there is a safety net (if you ask me anyway!)

The Calculus Trap...

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/AoPS_R_A_Calculus.php

In my mind, this doesn't really apply to us, because our choices are A and B, without C even being on the table, .

'Course I'll save CFK her latest plug and say that AoPS really seem like FANTASTIC classes, and hopefully in time we'll find ourselves in one, .

LOL! It's a great analogy, and dead on, I think. I wrestled with this same issue last year, and ultimately I decided that you definitely try going deep first, mainly since it tends to be more convenient for the teacher. (Realism there...) If enrichment works for the kid and it's enough, then great. But for a lot of HG+ kids in elementary school, deeper simply won't be enough! There's only so deep you can go with basic calculation! As you say, logic and story problems are great, but even those get old if you're just working on 3-digit addition or the like...There's just very little depth to plumb there! Until you get to somewhat higher math--though I'm not sure how high you have to get--it's just plain hard to go deep.

You can do things not included in the curriculum. Maybe that's "going wide?" LOL! I do like that approach and have used this a bit myself. The history of math is not in the normal curriculum, and that's something we're attacking this year. Tesselations, Escher's stuff and fractals are popular with the homeschool crowd even with pretty young kids but aren't the norm in schools, I don't think. (I could be wrong...) I do think you can slow things down in that way without boring the pants off a kid.

My strategy is go deep and go wide until I see that I'm starting to lose him, then I'll go on to the next thing. With these kids, I think that means you're going to go a little fast at least, if not really fast...But I don't see a way around it.

What's more, I don't see any compelling reason not to!

My son had to do these types of problems last year, in spite of being way past that level.

I did them for him (I mimicked his writing). I'd teach him something he was ready for during the time that would have been devoted to math homework (so, two sessions per week with me). I did NOT want him to waste his time and squander his love for maths on these worksheets.

This approach helped in a lot of ways, not the least of was mental health-wise. It was a covert act of rebellion, and we were getting away with it. Plus, we were in it together, so it was a bonding thing.

Val