IXL or something else?

[ColdinNovember]

Just looking for some recent thoughts on IXL mainly for my DD in year 5 but will sign her brother up as the cost is similar for 2 children.

she struggles in most areas to be honest my focus is on maths and English. I’m looking for something where we can do a baseline test and then identify the gaps with me or IXL helping with this.

ixl provides practice exercises but doesn't teach the material. if the student has gaps in understanding, ixl won't really help. Also the number of repeats can't be tailored to the student, and getting one wrong sets you back and increases the overall number of repetition so that it can feel interminable - can lead to a lot of frustration.

We liked maths whiizz a lot better. it does teach/explain. and it has a very decent in-built assessment which will gauge where the student is, broken down into about a dozen areas - this is worth doing in any case. Conquermaths also teaches the material. They either have a free trial or a monthly subscription, so not much investment needed to give them a try. The main difference is that maths whizz is more animated/gamified (but still covers the stuff seriously) whereas conquermaths is more conventional video + worksheet.

Thank you that is really helpful. I will take a look at both of them.

My kids use IXL extensively and I find the formatting very simple to use. In each year group, you can find exactly the concept you need to practise. True, it doesn't really teach the concept so a parent can be handy to help explain it. The true value of the website is numerous problems to practise until you understand it completely (shown by getting 100% from consecutive number of correct answers).

I've found other maths websites to have too many bells and whistles that are either distracting to the kids or difficult to navigate as a parent.