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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.
Kordemsky’s Moscow Puzzles are a nice supplementary resource. Maybe Art of Problem Solving prealgebra.
Beast Academy -- made by the Art of Problem Solving team -- might be challenging enough, and has a great online program. It's focused on elmentary-levle math but truly deep, wihch sounds like what OP is looking for.
https://mathpickle.com/ is a wonderful treasury of puzzles that will induce kids to think deeply on problems. Not an online program, rather an intro to puzzles to complete in meatworld. Probably better in groups but I do some of the puzzles 1-on-1 with my gifted 8yo.
Thanks :) We were already looking at Beast Academy, but I've added Math Pickle!
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