A friend recommended Khan Academy for math practice for the big kid, so we tried it out. Naturally after our two weeks of internecine tablework warfare she loves it. (Thank you, Ms.B!)
The site gives virtual badges for activity on the site (watching tutorial videos, gaining proficiency in skills, and so forth) and (I already knew this about her) she is incredibly motivated by that sort of thing (unsurprisingly she also loves Girl Scouts). It's nowhere near as graphically engaging as the Web Rangers program she adores, but so far she is showing that same drive to fill up progress bars, light up proficiency stars, and generally be rewarded with visual representations of progress and completion.
I'm not sure how I feel about that. In my Master in Teaching program (which I didn't finish, I don't want to misrepresent myself here) we joked about "gold stars", or external motivators, because they are thought by some to be detrimental in the long term (the ideal being "intrinsic" motivation, or doing something for its own sake, to please and satisfy oneself). In this context I don't know. With those progress bars lighting up her eyes she's been happy to blast through multiple digit arithmetic with borrowing and carrying (taught to her in a crash course on a crumpled slip of paper when she called her dad over to ask how a person might subtract one three digit number from another) when single digits on paper foam her up into high melodrama.
She's a funny and frustrating one, our kid.
But hey-she's not one moment "behind". And it's almost summer. We have plenty of time to find the shoe that fits. That I will be thankful for without reservation.