Adding as separate comment to my earlier remarks because it isn’t a traditional gift (and because I didn’t actually think of it until after I posted my earlier comment): consider getting her a tutor. I don’t know what your budget is, but one of the things that could help her the most is regular tutoring in math and science. Unfortunately, the obvious people to use for this are grad students and there are unlikely to be many easily accessible grad students in rural locations.
In general, if the science curriculum is poor the math curriculum likely also suffers, and in the long-run that may matter more since so much serious science depends on math. One thing to do is to get her interesting math to do. However, I don’t know anything specifically aimed at that young an age range. One thing you definitely can do that doesn’t take any money (and thus doesn’t fall into the gift thing but may be a good idea) is give her interesting puzzles to solve that challenge her. This may require careful calibration. But at that age, doing something like simply explaining ideas like primer numbers can cause kids to go off and play on their own with the ideas. There’s a lot of evidence that females are more vulnerable to math anxiety than males and that this is highly culturally mediated. See [e.g. this study (pdf). This is likely to be even more severe in a conservative, rural environment. So taking steps to help get her to enjoy math and understand that it is ok and even good for girls to like math may be helpful.
I like this idea and if I lived closer I would definitely do this myself (being a grad student and all). There is a serious dearth of qualified tutors in her area, and I have tried to get my parents to sort of tutor her with the Khan academy website, but I don’t know if they use it.
Adding as separate comment to my earlier remarks because it isn’t a traditional gift (and because I didn’t actually think of it until after I posted my earlier comment): consider getting her a tutor. I don’t know what your budget is, but one of the things that could help her the most is regular tutoring in math and science. Unfortunately, the obvious people to use for this are grad students and there are unlikely to be many easily accessible grad students in rural locations.
In general, if the science curriculum is poor the math curriculum likely also suffers, and in the long-run that may matter more since so much serious science depends on math. One thing to do is to get her interesting math to do. However, I don’t know anything specifically aimed at that young an age range. One thing you definitely can do that doesn’t take any money (and thus doesn’t fall into the gift thing but may be a good idea) is give her interesting puzzles to solve that challenge her. This may require careful calibration. But at that age, doing something like simply explaining ideas like primer numbers can cause kids to go off and play on their own with the ideas. There’s a lot of evidence that females are more vulnerable to math anxiety than males and that this is highly culturally mediated. See [e.g. this study (pdf). This is likely to be even more severe in a conservative, rural environment. So taking steps to help get her to enjoy math and understand that it is ok and even good for girls to like math may be helpful.
I like this idea and if I lived closer I would definitely do this myself (being a grad student and all). There is a serious dearth of qualified tutors in her area, and I have tried to get my parents to sort of tutor her with the Khan academy website, but I don’t know if they use it.