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Do people have advice for enriching online curriculum for a gifted autistic 8-year-old?
My son was kicked out of our local private school after less than a term for being too autistic for them to handle, and we have finally had to pull him from the local state school because the SEN support he had in place wasn't working this year. So we (mostly my wife - I work a City professional job) are now homeschooling an autistic 8-year-old mini-STEMlord. We started using Doodle Learning which is based on the English National Curriculum - after entry assessments he is within months of being ready for secondary maths (i.e. roughly 3 years ahead) and 1.5-2.5 years ahead in English. When he started school, his non-verbal IQ was assessed at 99.9th percentile.
He enjoys the Doodle Maths online exercises, but refuses to do the English ones unless paid. My memory, and as far as I can determine online, is that if you are more than 1-2 years ahead in maths you need enrichment (more conceptually difficult work and problems that require deeper thinking) rather than acceleration (going through the standard curriculum faster). The UK has a good system of maths enrichment for secondary schools organised around a tiered set of competitions leading up to the IMO, but I am not aware of anything for primary.
More broadly, my son has engineer-brain, which is close to my scientist-brain, but different enough that I don't know how to motivate him or get him to build things more complex than Lego. Do people here have advice? He loved forest nursery when he was little, and built things that a 4-year-old shouldn't be able to build. He has stopped since then.
Try https://mathacademy.com/ ? I'd guess that the enrichment vs acceleration concern has more to do with classroom management than the best interests of a given student.
Khan Academy is also good for acceleration, to a sufficiently self-motivated kid.
And you're right, the trouble with acceleration in general is all about the difficulty of teaching 15 kids to potentially 15 different levels at once. With enrichment you can teach the whole class the basics, then teach the quicker half of them "enrichment" extras while the slower half drills the basics into place, then teach the whole class the basics of the next standard material ... but if you instead accelerated the quicker half of the class straight into the basics of the next standard material, then you're stuck, aren't you? You've now got two separate classes, with nothing that you can teach them both at the same time, not if you're relying on a 15:1 student:teacher ratio rather than a 1:1 student:computer ratio.
All that said, there's lots of valuable things you can teach kids, even in mathematics, that would count as "enrichment" rather than "acceleration" vs a typical "get them the standard high school diploma" curriculum. Most of them that come to mind for me are somewhat impractical, aimed at mathematician-brained rather than engineer-brained kids (I guess the standard curriculum is standard for a reason?), but Boolean logic might be a good choice and can be taught from scratch, and vector geometry is IMHO simpler and more practical than a typical high school geometry class despite having little in the way of prerequisites.
I'd suggest @MadMonzer focus on the ways to build things that get gradually more complex than Lego. Technics vs regular Lego, perhaps, or 3D printing with a simple CAD tool for design? Perhaps programming? Even with nothing physical to it, writing a simple little game scratches that same "I built something" itch, and you can get a Pi or Arduino or whatever to add physicality.
And if you lump the fast students in with the slow students from the next year up, that still doesn't work well to sync the curricula, as now you have a classroom with two groups of people who vary quite dramatically in how quickly and readily they learn the subject.
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